By Tristan Bishop
To quote British rapper Akira The Don – ‘Don’t come talking to me about no post-apocalypse. Look up apocalypse in the dictionary. It’s like a Sunday. There ain’t no post.’ He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t stop the post-apocalypse from being perennially popular in horror and sci-fi, and right now, thanks to the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Walking Dead, the subgenre is at its most popular since its early eighties heyday, but it’s still a rarity when the basic set-up varies from the Mad Max 2 or Dawn Of The Dead templates. Having said this, along comes a little film from Northern Ireland with a tiny budget, tiny cast and a refreshing take on the basic premise, and for a small film it has been making a big impression on the festival circuit so far.
After a subtly unnerving credits sequence, featuring the most disturbing animated graph ever seen on film (trust me on this one), first time director Stephen Fingleton draws us into the daily routine of the unnamed Survivalist (played by Martin McCann) as we observe how he grows plants, collects water and heats his shack – all the while brandishing a shotgun and looking over his shoulder. When an older woman called Kathryn (Olwen Fouere) and her teenage daughter Mija (Mia Goth, previously seen in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac) arrive at his ‘farm’ and beg for food, the Survivalist treats them with extreme suspicion, training his gun on them and checking every corner for hidden associates. When the initial negotiations are met with hostility, Kathryn offers up Mija to the Survivalist for the night. He accepts, and the women end up staying. But, of course, the farm was only built for one, maybe two people, and there are some very dangerous people prowling the wilds.
The first thing to mention about The Survivalist is that it doesn’t look like any other post-apocalyptic film that I can bring to mind – The usual scorched earth vistas are here replaced by wild forests, babbling brooks and long grass. We’re never given the exact nature of the catastrophe that has befallen mankind (past the initial graph), but rather than the main threats being radioactive fallout or atomic mutants, here mankind is struggling against itself for simple resources, and has been for several years at least, judging by the few clues we are given. For this is not a film which signposts and narrates; instead we are left to draw our own conclusions at several points – and it is all the more effective for it, allowing the three leads the space to tell their story physically – surely a gift for any decent actor – and all three are astonishingly good. McCann’s haunted, suspicious nature draws you in and heightens the tension throughout, Fouere totally convinces as a woman willing to do anything to keep her and her daughter safe, and Goth (rather disturbingly looking a lot younger than her 23 years) is fragile yet decisive.
The brutal honesty in the performances is even reflected in on-screen nudity – all three characters have explicit nude scenes. It’s still uncommon to see full-frontal male nudity treated in such a straightforward manner, and as for an older woman, well, that’s almost unknown, and, I have to say, very refreshing to see. McCann even gets to masturbate in close-up onto some seed pots at one point – presumably to give them some minerals (unless he just really likes soil). There are other unflinching scenes here too (although none that I can mention without spoilers) – one in particular bringing sharp intakes of breath from everyone in the screening I attended, and the whole thing is given an extra layer of realism by the way sound is treated in the film – there is no music (except when a character blows a few notes on a harmonica), and the sparse dialogue is augmented by natural sounds of the countryside.
There is analogy and metaphor in the film if you want to look for it, on the dangers of capitalism and isolationism, but at heart The Survivalist is a film about human behaviours at their most animalistic and unfettered – It’s tense, shocking, thought-provoking, and above all honest, and it deserves to be seen.
The Survivalist is out in UK cinemas and on VOD on 12th February, from Bulldog Film Distribution.