If you knew that the world was about to end, what would you do? No, what would you do? Rage? Panic? Loot? Or spend the time trying to atone for a lifetime of missteps, treating your imminent demise as a means of finding purpose? Films tend towards the louder, messier, angrier answers to that question, but not without exception, and Exposure 36 (2022) is one such exception. It’s a film focused on more intimate human stories, albeit against a backdrop of a world three days away from destruction.
The first notable thing here is that – well, the world seems to be taking it rather well. Admittedly the three-days-to-doomsday thing doesn’t seem to be completely nailed down, though people are still treating it as if it is – but the streets are quiet, the radio offers listeners the chance to hear their favourite tracks before the three days are up, and commercial flights are doing their best to get people home to their loved ones, for as long as they’re still able to fly. This is of no apparent interest to Cam (Charles Ouda), whose priorities seem to be sifting through his vast, saleable array of prescription meds and spending the rest of his time photographing what he sees around him, using one last roll of film he finds. Is he just hiding behind the lens? A comment in The Blair Witch Project (1999) suggested as much; that real life and all its horrors feels safer refracted through a lens. We know that Cam has his demons, but he keeps ahead of them, moving from place to place, memorialising people and scenes with his camera, and selling his meds to anyone who needs them, earning a vast sum of – soon-useless – money.
Cam drops by a friend/customer’s house – a guy called Nick (Nick Smithson) – where he chats to Nick’s younger sister Katie (Jennifer Leigh Whitehead), a girl he’d bumped into by chance earlier: they hit it off. This could all have been just another drugs deal however, except Nick confides in Cam that he’s heard rumours of a ‘way out’ – access to an underground facility, some distance away from NYC. Nick wants in, and tries to convince Cam to invest his wealth in going along with them. Whilst Cam refuses, as he goes about his business he finds he’s drawn back to the pair, Katie especially. When she calls him later that day, now newly aware that she’s in a very precarious situation, Cam reluctantly agrees to help, but there’s more to this than a sudden disappearance.
What needs to be understood here is that Exposure 36 is an immensely slow-burn, muted film: it’s classed as a sci-fi, but it’s that fairly popular modern kind of sci-fi which eschews the big and bold, instead using an extraordinary premise to to examine what this could do to people’s psychological states. There’s nothing much fantastical here, and in fact it’s the intense quiet of the incoming apocalypse which is the most obvious fictional note in the film; it’s quite a reach in terms of plausibility, given how many people act after even a brief break in normality. The big question for viewers here is how much they will feel sustained by this human drama by the time the credits roll, as both the lack of urgency and the lack of obvious signs of the deadly situation facing these people is noteworthy.
However, the film does do a good job of building emotion, chiefly via Ouda as Cam, who dominates both screen-time and audience interest. It’s an incredibly self-contained performance throughout, with Cam seemingly genuinely perplexed by the behaviour of people he meets, even whilst holding back on his own emotions: there’s a sense of distance to him, something which does work well with the odd, often enigmatic situations he finds himself in. Overall, give or take a handful of slightly jarring moments of humour from others, the other characters are also subtly drawn. This reviewer perhaps expected the photography motif to move more to the fore as a plot device, but nonetheless this is used interestingly throughout, acting as a record of what unfolds around Cam and adding some artistry to it.
If Exposure 36 has similarities to any other film, it’s These Final Hours (2013): here, too, a man seeks personal redemption as the end of the world rattles towards him. The earlier film keeps this incoming event more in its sights, however, with a few moments of the kind of spectacle you may have come to expect. Exposure 36 looks carefully at the ordinary rather than running with the extraordinary, but it’s a well made, watchable film with a strong lead character and a great, immersive soundtrack. It does show some aptitude for doing genre film a little differently, and given this is writer/director Mackenzie G. Mauro’s first feature-length project, it will be interesting to see what comes next in his career.
Exposure 36 is available on VOD streaming platforms from May 10th, 2022.