Film Review: The Divide
Review by Marc Patterson
The end of the world won’t come with a warning. There will be no alarms, no Twitter hash tags, or Facebook fan pages. If you’re extremely lucky you’ll get a quick glimpse of your doom only moments before everything vaporizes around you. Such is the case with opening frames of The Divide. We emerge from the darkness with no grounding of space, surroundings or character. A single tear drop escapes the eye of a woman we don’t know, as she watches the city around her destroyed under a missile attack. It’s an oddly serene and surreal moment granted to us by director Xavier Gens before he hurls us into the maelstrom of the apocalypse full force, chaotically thrusting us into a world on the verge of ending and a new existence beginning.
A voice shouts out and we’re flung down a flight of stairs, presumably in an apartment building. The camera fluidly follows a young couple as they frantically seek an exit, and then smartly, before the nuclear explosion hits their building, they leave the screaming masses behind and make a break for the basement, managing to force their way into some sort of makeshift bomb shelter milliseconds before everyone and everything they used to know disappears forever.
Welcome to your shitty non-existence.
Meet Mickey, (Michael Biehn), a cranky pissed off man whose apparent skills of prophecy prepared him for this apocalyptic occasion. The ex-firefighter, now building super, has constructed a bomb shelter for just such an occasion, but the only problem was that he wasn’t prepared for company and like unlike Noah, his ship just took on eight extra passengers. Before dealing with his stowaways Mickey locks the shelter down and lays down the law of the land.
With a patient and restrained sense of pacing Gens carefully and quietly unfolds the horrifying and often violent drama of living out your days in a dank, dusty, and dirty hole, with hardly any food, limited water, and a slew of unfriendly faces surrounding you. This is Survivor: Hell Edition.
Eva, (Lauren German), the young girl we met in those pensive opening moments seems to be the only clear headed survivor amongst the group. Everyone else seems to either be excessively weak and fearful, which includes her boyfriend, or overly aggressive ready to fight to the death to become top dog. As each day passes the group becomes increasingly splintered, paranoid, and crazed – and Gens’ has handed us a front row seat to witness how the last of humanity is snuffed out.
The Divide is every bit as bleak and horrifying as I’ve painted it up to be. It’s easily on par with The Road and I feel understated when I say that this is easily Xavier Gens’ best work to date. That’s not to say I didn’t love what he did in Frontier(s), turning up the ampage with his twist on the cannibals next door story, or blowing us away with his adrenaline fueled take on a video-game flick. (Yes, I loved Hitman. It was slickly brutal and a rare gem in an otherwise watered down genre). But, neither of those two films were exactly original in concept, whereas The Divide stands out head and shoulders against the stacks and stacks of other post-apocalyptic films. In Frontier(s) and Hitman Gens’ compensated for simplistic plots by brilliantly showcasing his unique flair for orchestrating chaos against an otherwise familiar story. Imagine what happens when the same man trims away the predictability factor and flashy tricks of a high budget, injecting the story with unexpected twists and a downbeat story soaked in humanity’s most inhumane moments. It’s a mind-blowing experience that proves this French filmmaker has some serious style all his own. No question, Gens’ is constantly pushing the boundaries of what an audience can comfortably endure and consistently elevates familiar territory to its limits. The Divide is no exception. What’s truly amazing is that where we might assume the plot to take a fairly linear turn, (it was even shot in chronological order), Gens’ allows the film to evolve in an organic way, becoming a monster that few of us could imagine.
With solid, and largely improvised, performances from this talented ensemble cast The Divide successfully maneuvers around the easy to pigeonhole stereotypes of the typical cadre of characters we’ve otherwise come to expect from similar films, greying out any lines surrounding concepts of “good” and “evil”. Instead, the focus lingers on the devastatingly depressing process in which man is starved of the qualities that keep us civilized, while we waste away both inside and out until nothing else is left.
The Divide opens theatrically in the US today.
