Survive (2024)

"Well Executed French Post-Apocalypse Science Fiction"

After its UK premiere at this year's Frightfest, Frederic Jardin's really rather good French post-apocalypse movie gets a Digital release from Signature Entertainment.

Tom (Andreas Pietschmann) and his family are enjoying an ocean holiday on their boat when a worldwide apocalypse occurs. The magnetic poles are reversed causing all sea water to shift onto land and leaving the ocean beds as dry terrain. Marooned their one hope is to reach the bathysphere of oceanographer Nao (Olivier Ho Hio Hen) before, according to his instruments, the poles are to reverse again and the waters will come flooding back to their original position.

Don't worry too much about the science in SURVIVE. Instead just go with it because this is actually a very decent race against time post apocalypse thriller with some surprises along the way (which I'm not going to spoil). The landscape vistas are impressive and probably looked even more so on a cinema screen. 

It's a French movie, of course, so there's going to be urinating and nihilism but this is still a very good mashup of SF ideas, mainly riffing on Charles Eric Maine's fantastically bleak British SF novel The Tide Went Out. In fact SURVIVE is positively cheery compared with that so perhaps the nihilism comment is a bit excessive. But you can rely on there being some unexpected shocks along the way.

SURVIVE is an impressive piece of post-apocalypse cinema, so much so that it wouldn't be at all surprising if an American remake is in the works. By the time you get to the end you can imagine Roland Emmerich taking out his phone to contact Universal. Let's have a trailer:

Frederic Jardin's SURVIVE is out on Digital from Signature Entertainment on Monday 30th September 2024