‘The Divide’ – A Late Show Worth Staying Up For

Late shows can be a tough sell during the week.  Trying to balance work, sleep, and family responsibilities with a trip to the cinema after 9:00 pm can be challenging, but every once in a while a film comes along that justifies the aftermath of sleepiness and residual incomplete duties.  If you’ve been biding your time this year waiting for such a film to appear, your wait is over.  The action-packed science fiction thriller The Divide is being screened at The Plaza this evening for it’s one and only scheduled CIFF presentation, and trust me, you do NOT want to miss this one.  If you’re on the fence about late night weekday screenings, let this one help you decide in favour of them.  The Divide is so haunting, so tense, and so incredibly well done that it’s totally worth staying up past your bedtime.  After screening this film, I was left with a lump in my throat and existential musings floating around in my head for days.  What would I have done?  What would the ‘right’ thing have been?  How far would I go to survive?  And even more chilling – how far out is this ‘sci-fi’ premise?

The film begins in the midst of a nuclear attack on North America, and immediately the viewer is thrust into the panic and disorder.  Shot from an entirely interior perspective, an apartment building begins to crumble as tenants chaotically attempt to escape.  Before the walls come down, a select few make it to the super’s basement shelter and seal off the giant, steel door in fear of radiation poisoning.  Among the ‘lucky’ are two 20-something brothers, their unbalanced friend, a mother and daughter, an ex-cop, a young couple, and the brash, cigar-chewing superintendent. The first half is spent setting up character ethics, strengths, and weaknesses, and the second half knocks them down.  Once these folks accept that they are going to be trapped together for an indeterminate amount of time, they begin to cycle through coping methods.  Relationships that begin as attempts at camaraderie and unity eventually degrade into temper tantrums, humiliating power structures, and murder.  It becomes clear that the tragedy is no longer the nuclear fallout occurring outside of the basement, but the complete moral regression occurring on the inside of the dingy shelter.

While there are moments of intense graphic violence and explicit sexual content, The Divide does not exploit these taboo visual concepts in order to reach the audience.  Instead, the film uses every tool in it’s arsenal to pull the viewer through an intense, complicated, emotional experience.  As tensions rise, so to does motion within the frame.  During one scene, two men are arguing as another watches from a rickety stationary bike.  The yelling grows louder, the pedaling becomes faster, and the cuts become shorter until finally the disagreement climaxes and the audience can breath again.  The soundtrack becomes very useful in guiding the viewer through the emotional range experienced by the characters, particularly through the recurring piano score.  It’s no coincidence that each time a significant shift in emotion occurs, the soundtrack returns to this gentle motif.  The use of sound and music insists that this film is more than just a sci-fi thriller – it’s deeper and far more conceptual than 110 minutes of unmotivated violence.

Finally, I must address the chilling performance of Michael Eklund, who was last seen at CIFF in 2010’s Walk All Over Me.  This time around he plays a sinister, selfish young man who goes through an absolutely hair-raising transformation, both physically and mentally.  His performance had my skin crawling, and yet I couldn’t take my eyes off of him whenever he was in the frame.  Of all the despicable characters in the film, his was most interesting.  The viewer gets glimpses of his guilt and fear as it slowly drives him insane, and is left questioning his ultimate motives and disturbing complacency in the sickly dungeon.  That being said, the entire film is extremely well acted (and casted!) and will stay with you for days.

The Divide is playing Tonight, September 29th, at The Plaza at 11 PM.  Take a nap, grab a coffee, do whatever you need to do to stay up – you’ll be floored.  Tickets here.

–Erin Fox