I was recommended Xavier Gens’ 2011 film The Divide some months back by a friend. As a fellow purveyor of films of the post-apocalyptic flavour, he said I should watch it and advised that, while the film is not fantastic, my perseverance would be rewarded with a true portrayal of human nature. It sounded like some deep shit (those last two words are actually appropriately literal in one of the film’s more revolting scenes).
So, where does The Divide stand in the pantheon of post-apocalyptic films? Is it a masterpiece like 2009’s bleak and brilliant The Road (my second favourite film)? A stinker like the cataclysmic failure that was 1995’s Waterworld (kill it with fire)? I have read some reviews that proclaim the former and more numerous others that prefer the latter conclusion. Certainly, the film’s Rotten Tomatoes rating of 22% (incidentally the same as my final mark in GCSE Rocket Science) would seem to indicate that the majority of critics think of it more as a troubling poo stain than a satisfying piece of deep shit.
Now, everyone knows that disagreeing with film critics is more fun than agreeing with them and the best ones acknowledge that. What do I think about the film? Well, I’ll get onto that a bit later. First, I will give a short summary of the plot and subsequently propose a big question, the answer to which is neither ’42’ nor ‘money’.
The Divide starts with a bang. Literally. A group of people in an apartment block are just far enough away to witness a nuclear bomb detonating in their city and survive the initial impact. During the panic and screaming caused by the sight of the mushroom cloud, eight people manage to get into the basement before the building’s cigar-chewing superintendant Mickey locks the door.
Mickey, played by Michael Biehn (known for being Terminator’s Kyle Reese and Aliens’ Dwayne Hicks), quickly asserts his authority, rationing out the water and beans and stating that no one should enter his room under any circumstances. The people get talking and bean-eating but are soon rudely interrupted by a knocking on the door. After getting a very brief, disturbing and question-raising glimpse of what is happening outside the basement, the door is welded shut and the group sealed in. The complete removal of any hope for escape takes its toll on the survivors and the exposure of a secret being kept by Mickey kicks off their harrowing descent into violence, depravity and madness.
Sounds like Postman Pat material, doesn’t it?
Far from it, of course. The Divide has got to be one of the darkest, most difficult to watch films I have seen. The Road may be an incredibly sad film, but it has the warmth of the relationship between the man and his son and does end with a small measure of hope. Not The Divide. No, this film wants to make you feel awful from the opening seconds right up to the moment the credits start rolling. If the lead character Eva (Lauren German, Hostel: Part II) was not there to resist the degeneration of those around her and thus give you someone to root for, this would be the most drudgingly horrible thing you could watch aside from the BME Pain Olympics (please don’t Google this). So here is my question: why do we watch films that make us feel down and uncomfortable? What’s in it for us? We all know that watching a so-called ‘feel-good’ film has that very effect, bringing out positive emotions in us, so why the hecking flip do we choose to watch ‘feel-bad’ movies that make us experience negative emotions?
Horror films are massively popular today with the huge successes of films like Sinister and the Evil Dead remake and have been so since the very beginning of cinema – Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein(‘s Monster) and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula to name just two of the early monster classics. Isn’t it strange that so many people love the horror genre, which predominantly features bad things happening to people like us? Myself and many other film fans are often actually disappointed when a horror film has a happy ending (I am of the very firm belief that they should end fucking horrifically). Horror films are actively seeking to make us feel fear, something which evolved in humankind as a warning that you are about to be brutally taken down and eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger – a negative emotion. Or is it?
Perhaps unexpectedly, research has shown that people generally feel happy after watching a feel-bad film and this might have something to do with chemical activity in the brain. Katie Koerner has written an awesome article about this which you can read here, but the idea is that when we see (fictional) people having it worse off than us, we feel better about ourselves and, through empathising with them, we think more about caring for others. It’s something to do with oxytocin, which is some kind of brain stuff (I’m not that great on this kind of thing, I only got a mark of 17% in GCSE Brain Surgery). So when we’re trembling watching someone get stalked by a faceless being, possessed by a malicious demon or have the door slammed by a ghost, we’re actually feeling pretty dandy that it’s happening to the people in the film and not us. It’s essentially the same reason that people like watching depressing dramas about suffering people, which sounds bad when you think about it but it’s really just programmed into who we are. We must also remember that tragedies are as old as the performing arts themselves and were lapped up by the Ancient Greeks like a cat with a saucer of milk (apparently it’s healthier for cats to drink water, there’s not really any reason to give them milk besides tradition).
So we come back to The Divide, a film in which a small group of people are thrown into a horrendous situation straight out of a nightmare. As we watch the characters trapped in the basement without a hope for their escape, we empathise with them. Even, to an extent, the ones who go crazy and start cutting fingers off. As we feel bad for them, we feel good for ourselves and the fact that we don’t have to use a toilet with bits of cut up body in it. It’s a strength of The Divide in that, almost contradictorily, it also encourages (perhaps taunts?) you into putting yourself into the position of one of the survivors. In this regard it helps that The Divide appears to be set in our own reality’s all-too-possible near-future. It makes us think what we would do in the same situation and, by showing us the extreme of what we could become, gives us the incentive to believe we could be better than that. It makes us want to be better. Even though the ending shots seem to imply that there is no hope for the post-nuclear human race, the film as a whole makes us hope that such an event never happens in the first place. The film could be seen as a vision of the worst-case scenario that we desperately want to avoid.
All of this said, I still finished The Divide feeling horrible. It’s definitely one of those films where the lingering effect it has on you is a lot more powerful than how you felt as the credits start and you have a look at the names to see who that familiar person was then Google them as you don’t recognise the actor’s name (to help out, he’s Peter Petrelli from Heroes). However, there’s no denying that it does get you thinking and you won’t be forgetting it any time soon.
What did I think about the film itself? Solid 4 stars. Some of the acting (I repeat: some) is fantastic, especially Biehn and the unknown-to-me Michael Eklund as Bobby, the more aggressive survivor (he goes proper loony). The atmosphere is spot on, the soundtrack is amazing (I’ve been listening to it a lot since, the style is reminiscent of the scores for The Road, 28 Days Later and The Grey) and considering that 95 % of it is set in the same three rooms, it is very well shot. As with many films, it could have been shorter as at just under two hours, the barebones ‘plot’ seemed a little stretched.
To address some of the criticisms of the film, here are some points. A number of reviews comment that the radical change in behaviour of the characters is unrealistic in a short space of time (in fact it is not stated how much time passes so whether it is a short time is debatable). In defense of the film, I thought the characters were believable and we must remember that, after the door is sealed, these people know without doubt that the basement has just become their tomb. They’re not going to be able to just sit down and have a nice chat about films are they? This is a massive and terrible realisation to come to terms with and as we see in the film, it affects people differently. In this sense I thought the film was very realistic.
Other reviewers commented that a couple of the characters were pointless. One of these characters, Adrien, I only didn’t like initially (how can a character in a film with such a small cast be pointless?), but I believe that his behaviour towards the end added a lot to the film and could be related to. He is at first reluctant to join in with the crazies and is later seen nervously joining in a game of truth or dare with them, perhaps trying to integrate in order to protect himself from them (it doesn’t really work). This makes us think how we would act if this was taking place around us and wonder whether we would do as Adrien did for the sake of self-preservation.
The minimal explanation (i.e. none) of what’s going on outside the basement (I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s weird) has also been seen as a negative in a couple of reviews. Do people not like mystery any more? Do they prefer to be spoon-fed every last drop? I’m guessing these are the same people who were unsatisfied with the ending of Lost.
Another common criticism of the film is its ‘unnecessary’ violence and relentlessly dark content with no redeeming features, apparently meaning that it is not worth anyone’s time. After reading what I have discussed above, I hope you will agree with me when I say that yes, the violence is necessary (relating to the point I made about it being the worst-case scenario) and yes, the film is most definitely worth everyone’s time (provided they can cope with its extreme nature). Mankind has feared darkness since the birth of our species, but we have never ceased to respect it. It kills us, yet it also keeps us alive.
It is, as my friend put it, human nature.
And thus endeth the word of Tom.
The Word of Tom 