The Divide

The title of Xavier Gens’ gristly post-apocalyptic survival movie is working on a myriad of levels. Firstly, it’s the heavy duty door that separates the basement of a 5th Avenue New York apartment and a handful of its residents from the unexplained firebomb that rips through the city in The Divide’s opening seconds. It’s also what happens to the film’s clichéd band of survivors: they splinter and form alliances. So far, so every other claustrophobic B movie, right? Wrong. Gens' film messes with genre conventions and fucks with our heads: heroes become villains, good people get horribly mistreated, mysteries are set up but never explained. Radiation floods the basement, slowly turning characters insane. You get the feeling the same has happened to the film itself – it’s schizophrenic. This brings us to the final divide: the one that splits the audience. Gens' nihilism will be too toxic for some, but those open to the Frenchman's sledgehammer bravura will find a haunting, blackly comic take on humankind’s inhumanity. [Jamie Dunn]