Survive (2024) Review

Survive (2024) Review

When the oceans disappear, danger is all that remains on the surface. Julia and her loving husband are celebrating her son’s birthday on their boat in the middle of the ocean, but when a violent storm nearly capsizes them, the family awakes in a desert land. Earth has undergone a tragic polarity reversal, draining water from the oceans. After tragedy befalls the family, Julia must save her children in a world where hungry creatures from the abyss hunt for fresh flesh.

Shot in twenty days on a budget of a meagre five million Euros, director Frédéric Jardin’s crabby creature feature is scripted by Alexandre Coquelle and Mathieu Oullion. It was a script that producers Marc-Étienne Schwartz and Marco Stanimirovic enthused about and given their shared love of genre movies they got the flick made.

I can only imagine that either said script had been severely amended during the film-making process or that both producers are prone to getting excited by dodgy dialogue, bad characterisation, and any lack of thrilling content.

The film’s first third sees the central family out at sea having a jolly old time before the oceans disappear and they end up stranded in a dessert-type landscape. SURVIVE could easily have done without seeing the family on the ocean, firstly it adds nothing substantial to an already slim plot and secondly the appalling dialogue and delivery of said dialogue had me thinking that I was watching a badly dubbed foreign film.

The film’s last half-an-hour, when a multitude of hungry crabs pop out to dine on human flesh, is the most satisfying part. Prior to then SURVIVE is tonally uneven and for my money it was time spent with people I did not particular warm to or care for.

Trailer

Survive is available on Digital Platforms 30 September. Distributed by Signature Entertainment