Frédéric Jardin directs Survive. The film stars Émilie Dequenne, Andreas Pietschmann, Lisa Delamar and Lucas Ebel.
In its simplest form, Survive tells the story of a family of four attempting to stay alive after a world-ending natural disaster causes the ocean to recede completely. That is all that you need to get into this film, and once you’ve seen the final product, it will become clear that’s as far as the filmmakers choose to go with said story.
Some films that heavily emphasise tension and draw out suspense can benefit from a simplified narrative but Survive doesn’t. Instead, the film feels as if it struggles to fill its runtime. Once the initial disaster happens, the film finds increasingly unrealistic ways to ramp up the suspense that wasn’t initially there. Any scenes that genuinely create a sense of tension are short-lived due to a strange occurrence out of the control of the main characters, or, more often than not, it is caused by the characters’ incompetence instead.
The film constantly tries to make you as an audience feel sympathetic towards the main family, and during the opening moments you do. However, once they find themselves deserted all attachment slowly fades with these characters. The mother and father, played by Émilie Dequenne and Andreas Pietschmann, are fine in their respective roles and they convincingly work as a husband and wife pairing. The problem mostly lies in their two children. There are many instances where any danger that occurs is a direct result of one of the children doing something uncharacteristically stupid. The way in which these two characters are written feels counterintuitive in trying to make the audience care for them.
Most of these issues wouldn’t be as noticeable if the film nailed its pacing, which it also doesn’t. The film never drags, but the time it takes to let certain scenes sit can be awkward in the final product. It hits all the usual beats, from a scene where they reflect on the life they once had to one of the family members going back to save somebody at the last minute, but does it all in a manner that is borderline lazy, as if it has a checklist to tick off.
The film is partially a mess. The cinematography and overall look of Survive is genuinely stunning. For the most part, the sense of scale is brilliantly well realised, and Frédéric Jardin does a fantastic job of making the dry, desolate seabed look as convincing as possible. The effects are also reasonably well done for most of the runtime. Considering the budget and restraints this film probably had, there’s no denying that they did their best to make it look the part.
Survive has moments of potential, but they are only sporadic. What it achieves in its visuals, it unfortunately lets down with its characters, writing, pacing and almost everything else.
