The Divide | Review

After appearing as part of the New French Horror Wave in 2007 with his debut feature, Frontiere(s), Xavier Gens returns to independent roots with his third film, The Divide. A post-apocalyptic thriller chamber piece, Gen’s latest manages to be more derivative than divisive, with some heavy handed flourishes that nearly bungle the entire proceedings.

Opening with a nuclear attack on New York City, the tenants of a high rise apartment scramble into the building’s basement, a bunkered lair where the building’s superintendent, Mickey (genre star Michael Biehn) resides. A dank, dark labyrinth, we observe from Mickey’s room that he was a firefighter that lost his family on September 11, which explains his built-in bomb shelter and panic room. Refusing to let any of the occupants out of the door until the radiation clears, which will be “when he says so,” the cantankerous survivors immediately begin to rebuke their savior and wheedle each other. Mickey’s motley wards consist of a distraught mother (Rosanna Arquette) who attempts to soothe her young child; a hot tempered but humane man who demands answers (Courtney B. Vance); two arrogant and unreasonable young men, Josh (Milio Ventimiglia) and Bobby (Michael Eklund) ratchet up the tension while Josh’s younger brother Adrien (Ashton Holmes) tries to keep them calm; and a quietly perseverant young woman (Lauren German) and her weak husband (Ivan Gonzalez).

As Josh and Bobby grow antagonistic towards Mickey, their basement hideout is violated by a group of men wearing biohazard suits that abduct the young girl. The survivors manage to kill several of these intruders and use one of their suits to go above ground to discover that nefarious scientists have quarantined the space around their hideout. But due to their tampering, said scientists weld them into their lair. And as more time passes and the supplies are usurped by the younger males, the survivors divide themselves into two groups.

Not surprisingly, choosing to open immediately with a nuclear attack works against narrative and character development in The Divide, nearly crippling it beyond repair. Closed into the small space where we assume many of them will meet their doom, we are treated to run-of-the-mill archetypes sputtering lazy vagaries and a scene chewing Michael Biehn spouting darkly humorous zingers that unhinge any seriousness to the proceedings.

Nearly the first forty five minutes of the film is the stuff you’d see in a made-for-Sci-Fi channel movie. However, Gens manages to resurrect the flagging picture, albeit through bizarre perversity (Roxanna Arquette, still game for strange) and brutal violence, providing a climax that’s nothing new, but fascinating in that it manages to hold your attention after such an uninventive first half. Flourishes of racism and misogyny (think what would those Lord of the Flies boys would have done if girls and not pigs had been on that island with them) take a backseat to a rampant amount of homophobia, all adding to the unsavory tension and causing us to care little for who or what may survive this ordeal. This includes a lack of pathos for our nearly catatonic heroine (Lauren German), who does little to rebuke the rising terrorism. As each character regresses from humanity, Michael Eklund (at first a grating and hammy presence) steals the show as he deteriorates from looking like Vincent Price to an androgynous Max Schreck. Cinematographer Laurent Bares (who was DP on Frontiere(s) , the excellent Inside and the not so good La Horde) manages to create an appropriately dank and dour look, one of the film’s few strengths (though the Tequila Sunrise nuclear bursts that open the film aren’t particularly astounding). Sadly, there’s nothing new that Gens or screenwriters Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean bring to the table, which makes for a tiring tribulation at a running time of 110 minutes.

With 2012 already upon us, the Mayan prophecy of world’s end is destined to become more pervasive in the future cinematic offerings. But it’s the tagline for The Divide that reinforces the film’s glum outlook and proves the least hackneyed element about it, proclaiming that “the lucky ones died in the blast.” His film makes a strong case for that. Or maybe you’d rather be caged with strangers losing their minds while eating kidney beans and getting raped for an inordinate amount of time. Which side of the divide are you on?

Rating 2.5 stars