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The Divide – 2011 EIFF

By Andrew Watson · June 22, 2011

The world is coming to an end. At least that’s what pop culture wants you to think, having bombarded the audience with disaster movie after disaster movie after horseman of the apocalypse. During my long weekend at the Edinburgh International Film Festival I sat through three world-ending pieces, dealing with climate change, contagious illness, and in the case of The Divide, nuclear disaster. The Atom bomb appears everywhere now, in serious concepts like the road and in fluff like Indiana Jones.

The Divideattempts to be the former: “To survive the end of the world, you must first survive each other” reads an excited little blurb and gives a fair description of the film. Nine members of an apartment complex have managed to fight their way into a panic room owned by building superintendant and the name going on the front of the DVD Michael Biehn, who is a mixture of hysterics, selfishness, and racism. He sets the rules and boundaries of his yard, including a very specific rule: don’t go into my room. Our protagonist is Eva (Lauren German) who seems to serve as the moral compass. She is joined by some odd and aggressive young adults: a painter, her nerdy ex, a wily older adult, a mother and her daughter. Having so many characters certainly allows variety, especially in a story that takes place in the same spot for nearly two hours, but the plot buckles under the strain of trying to juggle nine characters around fairly evenly.

This has a negative effect on the film, in which turns into about 5 or 6 different little stories all crammed into each other with no room to breathe or develop. Quite early, there is a big plot involving the outside world in which some men in white suits enter the bunker, revealing some unusual goings on. The plot then ends ten minutes later as they are back inside sealed shut and leaving many questions unanswered. The rest of the film unfolds as a ‘lord of the flies’ like insight into the human condition and the levels that people could sink to when faced with no food, little water, and heavy doses of radiation seeping through.

There are many things wrong with The Divide, but my opinion of the film was improved by the work of director Xavier Gens. He has an excellent eye for composing a scene, and he manages to bring some of the better ideas in the script to life. One particularly good scene involves Bobby (Michael Eklund) forced to dispose of a body in the most inhumane way, and a turning point as they begin to lose their grip on their own humanity. It’s handled aptly, showing Bobby hitting a breaking point and allowing the film to slowly peel away at the survivors’ consciences.  The Divide builds momentum fairly well and creates a series of conflicts between its minibus-sized cast of characters. Its pace starts off messy and rushed but quickly settles into a slow burning thriller in which the community falls off a cliff in the second half and the final 30 minutes are a melting-pot of animal instincts versus moral values.

However, its lack of a coherent plot is not the only problem plaguing The Divide. Eva is the films main character, but is absolutely lost in a sea of hysterics. She is the quiet nondescript virtuous one, who is clearly intended to be a main character or protagonist, but seems to go missing for huge chunks of the film. She arrives late to the party in the second half and finally starts to provide some interest, but we never see anything significant till the very last scene of the film. Eva should have been a more vocal presence from the outset, or at least a more active one trying to link the group together rather than skulking in the shadows and watching everything unfold.

I also had a problem with the films tone, which is unrelentingly grim and occasionally drops into outright nastiness. The incendiary and shocking role of the mother in the later parts of the film is handled fairly well, but in the context of a film that gives rarely any hope, feels like a step too far. The film feels like one bad thing after another is going to happen and that there is no light at the end of the tunnel for any of the people in this shelter, but films can only keep themselves going through a constant shift between success and failure, survival and death, hope and despair. If Eva had a goal or a more noticeable presence in the film, she could have been that little ray of hope to carry the group and the film through the tough times.

However, she isn’t, and instead the film revels in the darkness. Despite this, The Divide is a fairly decent case study that creates tension and conflict well. It’s too bad it just gets lost in the process. But if you really want to watch a depressing nuclear bomb film that at least has some humanity, watch the Japanese animation Barefoot Gen instead.