Not too far into this movie, one of the
characters remarks that "In order to live, you have to survive."
Perhaps that is a reason we here at a
wasted life have never been all that survivalist-minded — or, to use more
contemporary vocabulary, prepper-oriented: as far as we can tell, too many
people are already just surviving (but barely), and not living. The concept of
suddenly having to work even harder to survive as our bodies rot away due to
nuclear fallout, or everyone reverts to cannibalism due to a shortage of food,
or we slowly puke our insides out due to flesh-rotting bacteria, or simply lose
our glasses in a situation in which new ones are as impossible to attain as
having toothache taken care of, getting a decent glass of wine, or treating an
old-fashioned case of the clap or hemorrhoids, appeals to us about as much as
having kids. (In other words: nada.) Life is meant to be lived, and surviving
ain't living. And if you can't live, why survive? (Of course, we have the
luxury of saying that from a continent where, amidst the current "corona
crisis", if we want toilet paper and fresh eggs or vegetables or milk or
coffee, we just have to walk three short blocks to the nearest store, where
they give away free facemasks — unlike our sister who, living in "god's
chosen country", can't get anything.* She's started her vegetable garden on
her patio because she's frightened; we, on the other, have started planting
stuff between our citrus trees because we've got the space and time and
lockdown needs variety.)
* Now, since the day we wrote this review some weeks ago, she can get almost everything again, but the streets are burning. Oddly enough, her medical-necessity smoke gets delivered with a regularity that truly deserves the description of "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds".
But, whatever. The Decline is a French
Canadian movie about preppers, one which you can watch in English, if you don't
mind too much that the lips onscreen don't always move correctly to words said.
A thriller, it never truly ascends it Netfux TV roots and is often rather
predictable, but for that it is well-shot and offers enough suspense to keep
you interested.
The Decline opens with a family suddenly gathering their shit
together and disappearing into the night, as if the film that should follow
will be one of preppers in the decline of society. But the movie quickly pulls
the rug out of that expectation, revealing instead that the family of three is
merely conducting a dry run similar, you might say, to the fire drills we used
to do in school and the shooter-on-campus drills school kids do now. The scene
not only introduces us to the main white male character of identification, but
also serves to point out something that should be obvious: all kinds of people
are preppers, including young yuppie couples with kids — and single women who
like canning, hot mixed-race chicks suffering guilt more than war-induced
post-traumatic syndrome, overweight guys that probably mistake their real
abilities for those of their avatars in their favorite computer game,
over-strung jerks just one step away from snapping, and mildly overweight piano
players. (Generically black people, less likely — possibly because they're too
busy trying not to be accidentally killed by the local cops and/or
stand-your-ground idiot[s].) Basically, anyone dominated by a fear of
social/societal collapse, a fear that has been around probably as long as
society has, is a viable prepper. In turn, being a prepper in itself doesn't
make a person the bad guy — and, initially, no one in the movie is a "bad
guy". Some are merely more likable than others.
And that is one of the strongest points of The
Decline: it doesn't really point fingers — it is only after the shit hits the
fan that anyone truly becomes "the bad guy(s)" or the
"hero(es)". And even then, there are probably those out there that
would even see the actions of the "bad guys" as justified, or at
least of the actions of Alain (Réal Bossé). He merely wants to
save that which is his, that which he has built up — and society is going to
collapse, after all (eventually). That said, however, even if no one in this movie
starts out as an obvious villain, the fact that the shit is bound to hit the
fan hangs in the air like a Damocles sword from the moment Antione (Guillaume
Laurin) parks his car amidst the snowy landscape and hands over his smartphone.
And it is when the shit hits the fan that the chaff is separated from the
wheat: there are those who still turn to the society they expect to collapse,
and those who want to keep their off-the-grid safety for that unavoidable, if
date-unknown, disaster they know is to come one day.
All that subsequently happens in The
Decline after Antione arrives to Alain's survivalist training, possibly excluding
the mid-film Psycho-inspired change of character focus, is predictable to say
the least, but it is the very predictability of the train of events that keeps
the movie so grounded in reality — excluding, we would argue, the unrealistic
river scene that truly bonds Antione and Rachel (Marie-Evelyne Lessard), the
latter the kind of totally hot and capable survivalist woman that any and all
man or woman would want by their side when the world as we know it finally, truly,
succumbs to a zombie virus.
Hardly a masterpiece, The Decline remains
highly watchable, and as a feature-length film debut, it also indicates promise
regarding the director, Patrice Laliberté. There are worse Netfux movies out
there to watch on a corona-induced lockdown evening at home — like 6
Underground (2020), which we've chosen to forget we ever saw. (Tyler Perry's
car wreck of a movie, A Fall from Grace [2020], on the other hand, is so
unbelievably unprofessional and bad on every level that it achieves a
transcendentally Ed Woodian intensity. That, in turn makes the movie immensely
enjoyable, if you like your films as bad as we tend to.)
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