Hello this is Jake Winters for Eye on the Triangle this is Snowverated and this week I will be taking a look at the film The Survivalist.

This film is one of the most tense that I have ever seen. From the moment you begin watching it until the screen fades to black every moment is filled with suspense and uncertainty. The story is set in Northern Ireland after a food shortage has left the country in an apocalyptic state. It follows one man, known as the survivalist, as he survives attacks and takes in two traveling women. The movie gets straight the reality of the situation. He is surviving he never lets his guard down and this leaves the audience with theirs up for the whole movie. Every situation is life or death in their situation and it trust is out the window.

The filming of the movie and setting choice is spectacular. The surroundings in the movie are vibrant and green. It seems as though it would be plentiful with food, but surviving in the wild is never easy even if you are in the middle of a forest that is full of life. The shots of him farming and taking care f his shelter are interesting at the beginning setting the scene but are somewhat boring. They create suspense because you are just wondering what is going to happen to make this situation intensify as every movie always does. This is a clever use of the viewer’s expectations. The back and forth of trust in the movie is done extremely well. It is impossible to know when someone will turn on the other and what is being planned any of the characters could be anything. This very basic human response to survival is so well shown in the movie you ca almost predict what is going to happen. If you put yourself into their situation you know wat the logical choices are even if they are the tough choices. When the characters are faced with these choices we get a grim view of the struggle to survive in a food shortage. They are faced with the choices on whether to repopulate or not and obviously if you are struggling to survive on your own you don’t want to add another mouth to the equation. But what happens if everyone decides this. The human race will eventually die out. This scenario provides a lot of interesting questions that I could go on and on about but it is suffice to say that the writers did a great job of placing the characters into a very rough and challenging environment.

The acting in this movie all around can be said to be good. There are parts that I feel are lacking in emotion but who’s to say that the characters are not just in some state of shock where they have some smaller amount of emotion, or at least visible emotion. The girl in particular is who I am talking about when talking about lacking emotion. It feels like she has one facial expression throughout the entire film. She may have experienced some amount of trauma during the fall of civilization leaving her numb to the world but this is never explained. On the topic of the characterization one of the more notable traits that all the characters have in common is the lack of hope. It is easy to see that almost all trust in the common man is lost. There were probably huge fights over food and seeing these fights leads to a loss of faith in humanity. Each character is trying to survive for themselves and no one else. The film shows us so much backstory in just the characters actions. The film writers may have been building upon that set archetype of the desperate survivor, but in doing so they also unleashed a common backstory that comes with that archetype. I feel like if this was unintentional it was a very happy accident more likely though it was thought out. At one point the survivalist says he has been there for 7 years which is staggering considering the situation he is in. You can tell he knows something about the area he is in which would have come from being there for seven years.

I felt like the story was very plausible and that is what makes the situation even scarier. If there were a large food famine in any country at this point in history all kinds of mayhem would ensue and it would definitely take more than a few years for society to ever become civilized again. This in between period that the film is thrown into is very interesting point right between new governments taking power and small raiders roaming the land. There is still essentially anarchy ruling the area at this point.

This film maintained a level of intensity throughout on multiple different levels. There were schemes and backstories and an overall great setting. I enjoyed seeing the survivalist struggle against nature and man. I will say that some of the movie is graphic. It had a rating in the us it would definitely be R so just keep that in mind. I am going to give this movie an 8/10.

Thank you for listening to this week’s edition of snowverated and Eye on the Triangle. If you have any comments on my review feel free to send an eot @ W-K-N-C.org. Have a good night