The Survivalist

(Stephen Fingleton/2015/UK)

In a post apocalyptic world a man lives in the woods, foraging and subsisting on a small vegetable patch outside is cabin. He is visited by two women, a mother and daughter, who capsize his insular existence and change everything. The Survivalist is a quietly intense vision of a bleak future and by keeping things simple it succeeds in creating a very believable and riveting story. It’s very much like a play with a single setting more or less and a cast of three. The performances, script and in particular the sound work combine to engage the viewer in a world of desperate self preservation. The recurring, engorged volumes of characters breathing and shuffling movements reminded me of the Norwegian film Blind in places. It is an effective way of placing a connective tissue of intimacy between audience and screen. The trio’s lives become bound, threats from without increase and the film reaches a cataclysmic and yet hopeful resolution. One of the better dystopian future flicks I’ve seen in some time.

(3.5/5)

Onibaba

(Kaneto Shindo/1964/Japan)

Opening with a close up of reeds shuffling in a howling wind Onibaba presents two women ambushing passing soldiers in the field of high reeds and murdering them to sell on their armour and weapons so they can buy food. There is a civil war and the younger woman’s husband, the elder’s son, is long gone. Their neighbour returns recounting the death of the husband who he had gone to war with. Slowly, he inveigles his way into their company, especially the young woman who he develops a relationship with, to the consternation of the elder. Within this ménage-a-trois the darker caverns of the human heart are explored; jealousy, greed, selfishness and lust are all on show. It is an unsubtle look at the baser instincts of humanity but within this rummaging there are some excellent cinematic treats. Visually it’s consistently striking and arresting, in particular the closing sequences involving the mask. The soundtrack is also brilliant and parallels, drives and enhances the offbeat and sinister goings on onscreen. Shindo takes a straightforward tale of human fallibility and raises it into the arena of myth and folktale with genuinely great artistic flourishes.

(3.5/5)

Better Things

(Duane Hopkins/2008/UK) 

Better Things is an unremittingly stark drama about the lives of teenagers in a rural town in midlands England. Mingling realism with a cinematic lyricism that aspires to the poetic it succeeds in an affecting portrayal of young people with little prospect or hope of opportunity. But it is relentlessly bleak, no one smiles, there is no fun, anywhere, in anything. Everyone under thirty in the film is trapped within a suffocating, existential gloom and as result most have turned to heroin. 

This horrific portrait of a generation, rudderless and unattended to by the wider constructs of society is mirrored in the sub plot of an elderly couple who are also at a nadir. Suspecting his wife of infidelity at some point much earlier in their marriage the husband struggles to reconcile his feelings about it. This reflection between generations is the winning stroke of Better Things as it expands the context of the problem of addiction to the more general problem of human communication, resolution of emotions and coping with adversity in daily life. No matter what age you are hopelessness can set in and how then do we cope? Simply relinquish the effort of decade’s long marriage, turn to the solace of an opiate haze, escape somehow? A shot of an overdosed boy is a visual cue invoking Thomas Chatterton and a romantic, poetical notion of escape from the bleak reality around them.

But the environment within Better Things is also romantic; there are continual shots of the surrounding landscape that inspire awe in the viewer. But the beauty and effusive presence of nature does not illicit any refuge or spiritual salvation for the characters and only furthers the tragedy on show. It is at points a gloomily beautiful film but it is equally an endurance test for the heart.

(3/5)