The Survivalist (USA, 2022)

(Spoilers.) Not to be confused with The Survivalist (2015 / trailer), a somewhat older and even more low-budget, post-apocalyptic movie that is both a bit more demanding and memorable. But if this Survivalist is unarguably the lesser of the two movies — say, spam vs. hotdog — it works well enough for what it is: a relatively generic but mildly diverting 1.5 hours of genre entertainment, interspersed with moments of unintentional laughter, a few truly effective scenes, some truly botched opportunities, a mildly interesting but ultimately distracting narrative structure telling past and present, uneven acting, and a storyline that just never seems to work as well as it should.

In regard to the story as a whole, the movie never works as well as it does the first five minutes, which quickly tells how society falls apart when a world-wide epidemic of a 99%-fatal strain of COVID breaks out. The scenes are accompanied by the chattering of an unknown woman on the radio (an uncredited Lori Petty, of Tank Girl [1995] and Route 666 [2002]), a survivor somewhere that seems to fill her time on air, babbling less like a post-apocalyptic radio announcer than a CB-radio enthusiast (remember CB radios?) on a roll.

Trailer to

The Survivalist:

The world of The Survivalist is the world of today, but slightly worse-off. COVID has now mutated into a virus that simply kills everyone — no "long COVID" here — and civilization as we know it has fallen apartment.* But low, one man survives the illness, Aaron Ramsey (John Malkovich of Shadow of the Vampire [2000 / trailer], Jonah Hex [2010 / trailer], Mutant Chronicles [2008], Warm Bodies [2013 / trailer], and Bullet Head [2017]), and before you can say Charles Manson, he has a fanatically faithful group of followers convinced he is the new messiah sent to save mankind.

* "This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper." — T.S. Eliot

But for that, he needs his fertile incubator. And so he and his faithful are hot on the trail of a young lady, Sarah (Ruby Modine, of better films, like Central Park [2017 / trailer], Happy Death Day I [2017 / trailer] & Happy Death Day 2U [2019 / trailer] and Satanic Panic [2019 / trailer]), whom they believe to be immune, with the intention of using her as the Eve of a new, COVID-resistant breed of mankind seeded by Ramsey. (Hey, not the stupidest thing to believe — some people actually believe Trump will save America.) She and her brother, Guy (Tom Pecinka of The Kill Room [2023/ trailer]), go on the run, doggedly pursued by the messiah and his motley crew. As a duo, they don't make it far, leading Guy to basically walk into the path of the bullets of the faithful so as to enable Sarah to make it to the compound of "the survivalist", Ben Hodges (Jonathan Rhys Meyers of the forgotten classic of cheese that is Killer Tongue [1996 / trailer], Octane [2003 / trailer] and Disquiet [2023 / trailer]) — who, despite having only been an office pencil-pusher at the FBI, seems to have a rep. Needless to say, Aaron and company soon show up and, well, you pretty much probably know the story already, don't you? 

Directed by B-film director John Keeyes (The Harrowing [2017 / trailer], Doom Room [2013 / trailer] and the short Mechanical Grave [2012 / trailer], amongst others), The Survivalist appears to be the first of four films written by scriptwriter Matthew Rogers,* who does not seem to be a man of any notable originality. The somewhat commonplace story Rogers wrote for The Survivalist is decidedly run-of-the-mill — we've seen it before, done better and done worse — but it also has, as already mentioned, some good unintentional guffaws and a decent scene of two. The biggest twist of the narrative, however, that the heroine, Sarah — SPOILER! — is basically a contemporary Typhoid Mary COVID Mary, is true headscratcher of a decision. In two seconds she goes from a young woman in desperate need of help to an incredibly selfish person: she consciously seeks out the help of the (healthy) survivalist Ben Hodges (Meyers), a man she doesn't even know, knowing in advance that her presence will infect him with a 99%-fatal virus. (Gee, she's really lucky that he's such a straight-up and understanding guy.) 

* All of which — namely, this flick here, Code Name Banshee (2022 / trailer), The Collective (2023 / trailer) and The Clean Up Crew (2024 / trailer) — were directed by John Keeyes. As a genre filmmaker, he is a very active and productive director.

Malkovich, who doesn't seem to say no to anything nowadays, has some howler dialogue when he first shows up, and one would be hard to say that he really nails it initially. But for all the questionable dialogue he has to spout, he keeps his gravitas and, by the end of the movie, achieves a level of believability and effectiveness. 

Meyers, in turn, usually remains believable as the kill-reluctant survivalist, but he truly makes some odd choices — like how he always chooses to duke it out with the individual fanatic instead of simply shooting them in the back. Seriously: they have said they are going to kill him, they have invaded his compound, they have shot him and they are actively trying to end his life, and yet he remains reluctant to the end to slay them, only doing so (with relative efficiency, after first always being beat to a pulp and despite bullet wounds) when it gets down to the brass tacks of being killed or killing. 

The killings, like the film itself, may be violent, but they are hardly glorified or heroic or flashy. That the deaths are always so dirty and undignified is perhaps one of the strongest aspects of the movie, as they buck the contemporary trend of aesthetic flash and high-fashion action choreography so common to most kill-happy flicks of the day. Somewhere along the way, it is faintly dropped that Aaron and Ben may have a history somewhere, but the point is never followed up on; but, for that, The Survivalist spends a lot of time filling in Ben's back story. Time and again, and particularly whenever the action starts, Ben has a flashback, which cumulatively reveal his troubled relationship to his gambling-addicted father Heath (Julian Sands [4 Jan 1958 – 13 Jan 2023] of Romasanta [2004], The Painted Bird [2019 / trailer], and Death Rider in the House of Vampires [2021 / trailer]) and how Ben came to his ranch and became "the survivalist". The flashbacks may be great for filling in Ben's backstory, but they do kill the tension, sorely and continually undermining the suspense of a movie that already has problems establishing and maintaining any. 

Neither truly bad nor all that good, The Survivalist ultimately falls smack-dab within the realm of the mildly entertaining but irrelevant. We blew 1.50€ at a cut-out store for our DVD of the middling movie, and while we don't exactly feel ripped off, we don't exactly feel like the movie was worth the money. On the other hand, if you can watch The Survivalist for free, you could do worse.