Now in limited theaters
When a freak storm hits their boat, a family finds themselves fighting for their lives when the ocean and dry land swap and monsters come out of the deep.
Written by Alexandre Coquelle and Mathieu Oullion, and directed by Frédéric Jardin, Survive is more of a tense thriller than a straight up horror film. Yes, there are beasties, but so few and so far into the movie that it should not be approached as a monster film. The story here gets going fairly fast but has some pacing issues which eventually lead to not caring as much about the characters unfortunately. The characters themselves are decently written but a bit predictable. There are a few surprises here and there in the story, but none of them are really scary or feel like they add all that much to the story sadly. This film has a story with a ton of potential and yet misses this potential so many times, it becomes a bit of a non-started of sort (after the start, so maybe a non-middler, if that’s a thing). The story does take a few good twists and turns here and there, but it’s missing something, it’s missing that stress that the tone of the film and atmosphere call for.
The cast here works quite well with Emilie Dequenne leading the pack as the mother, a doctor, who has to do everything she can to save her family, in particular her kids. Her work here is good but, like the story, feels like something is missing. Dequenne is a solid actress (who most American audiences will remember from Le Pacte des Loups/Brotherhood of the Wolf where she was sublime). Here, something is off. She does give the desperation a solid go and she does make the stress of a mom stuck in a dire situation with her kids become palpable in some scenes, but something is missing here and it’s hard to pinpoint what. Perhaps it’s something in the character writing or direction as something feels like it’s missing in most of the performances. Joining her as her kids are Lisa Delamar and Lucas Ebel. These two play teenagers and play them rather well, so much so that Delamar becomes annoying on screen as Cassie. She’s that quintessential seemingly uncaring, unbothered, and uninterested teenager. Her performance nails it, for better or worse. Ebel plays her younger brother Ben whose birthday it is at the start of the film. Ebel gives a more than decent performance, doing his best teen-out-of-his-depth performance which makes a lot of sense here. In a smaller part, Olivier Ho Hio Hen steals a few scenes as Nao, giving that scene a different energy and making it his own, then running away with the whole film as the most memorable performance of the bunch.
The film does look really good here with cinematography by Pierre Aïm (and team) is beautiful and just that right level of desolate, adding a bit of creepiness to the whole film by showing that vast emptiness of the sea and then of the desert. The images here are possibly the most interesting part of the film here. The look, the atmosphere, and the tone are very much created by these images, and they bring the story to life.
Survive is a film that is not bad but also not great. It’s ok which is sadly the kind of films that loses the attention here too easily. It’s not bad, it’s not great, it just is, which is not enough sometimes. The images are lovely, and the cast is decent. The story has some good ideas, but it doesn’t really build or keep much tension and, in the end, caring about the characters is not high enough for the stakes to matter all that much. There is something good in here, but it’s not enough to make the film more than passable.