Writer/Director: Stephen Fingleton
Starring: Martin McCann, Mia Goth, Olwen Fouere
Country: UK
Rating: TBC
Running Time: 104 mins
Release: Premiered at Belfast and Tribeca Film Festivals, awaiting UK and US distribution.
Two lines are pitched across a black graph, rising steadily before beginning a desperate descent into the darkness. The first represents global oil production; the second, the human population. From the conceptual opening of Irish filmmaker Stephen Fingleton’s debut feature-length drama, you could be forgiven for expecting a post-apocalyptic science-fiction romp keen to cash in on MAD MAX’s recent reboot. Yet what follows is something quite different. Beautiful, stark and quietly affecting, THE SURVIVALIST is a timeless fable of humanity at its most vulnerable, and a bold statement from a director with a very exciting future ahead of him.
Building on the acclaim of his short film, MAGPIE – effectively a precursor to THE SURVIVALIST – Fingleton has created a world that clashes against the typically dusty and sterile landscapes found in films like THE ROAD, INTERSTELLAR or even MAD MAX. Lush and abundantly alive, this is a future that has dragged man back to a more natural state, an overgrown Eden as fertile as it is destructive. Alone, yet entirely at one with this wilderness, is Fingleton’s title character, a man of physicality and necessity rather than good and evil, whose will to survive has outstripped all sense of his own humanity. This is a man who spares nothing – from his piss, which he rations around his crops, to his own dialogue, entirely absent for the first sixteen minutes of the film. The character’s cinematic silence is eventually broken by the arrival of two strangers to his campsite, Kathryn and her daughter Milja, played with effective yet unnerving inertia by Mia Goth. On the verge of starvation, Kathryn makes THE SURVIVALIST an offer he can’t refuse: food and shelter in return for her daughter’s body. And so begins a razor-sharp triangular relationship, based on the principles of exploitation, distrust and fear, and set against the growing threat of invasion from roaming gangs.
This is a genre that can often struggle for originality, yet THE SURVIVALIST cuts straight to the heart of what makes post-apocalyptic movies so compelling. Even in horror films such as 28 DAYS LATER, it’s the unleashing of humanity from recognisable laws and governance that creates the most poignant drama, and here, the filmmakers have stripped everything else back to intensify and deepen this single point. Martin McCann’s performance in the lead is full of brooding power, yet it owes much to the work of Fingleton and cinematographer Damien Elliott. Indeed, everything about this film builds towards an effect. The structure is brilliantly unsettling, more like a series of vignettes than a traditional three-act screenplay, perhaps due in part to Fingleton’s background in short films. The colours – deep greens and browns – maintain a breathless and claustrophobic atmosphere, and the sound, too, has been fine tuned to capture a forest bristling with danger. This is humanity in its most animalistic and unspiritual state, and Fingleton holds nothing back from his audience. There’s full frontal nudity, masturbation, infected wounds and homemade abortions on show throughout this film, yet none of it feels gratuitous. Many of the shots, too, are mesmerising – at one point the camera rises above McCann, continues over six metres of marshland and descends once more to find him poised and ready to strike in a new position. This is filmmaking of the highest order from a director still cutting his teeth in the industry.
The real genius of this film, however, lies in its ending, as Fingleton throws his whole presentation of the human condition into chaos with two final moments of unassuming beauty and surrender. These aren’t likeable characters and they don’t live in a recognisable world. What occurs between them isn’t romantic, nor is it rammed down the audience’s throat. In fact, it’s barely even there. Just the faintest echo of a question, pitched against a sparse and unfeeling darkness: what does it mean to be human?
Verdict:
