Last Survivors: Film Review
Jake (Drew Van Acker) is living the kind of back-to-nature existence that outdoorsy types would fantasize about when we first meet him. He catches fish in a creek and swims naked in its freezing depths, without seeing another soul. He eventually returns to the quaint log cabin he shares with his father, Troy (Stephen Moyer), after hiking through the forest to cook the day’s fish for dinner.
We find that Troy and Jake have been sharing a tiny utopia of two for many years, isolated from the remains of a ruined world. Last Survivors, on the other hand, doesn’t only want to provide the customary thrills of post-apocalyptic thrillers like A Quiet Place or It Comes at Night; it also wants to analyze their grim appeal, with intriguing but mixed results.
As in many of these stories, the family’s routine is soon upset by an outside force — in this case, Henrietta (Alicia Silverstone, who is quite strong in a well-written part), a stranger who lives alone in the same woods. Though Jake and Troy are used to killing and being killed by outsiders, Jake can’t bring himself to pull the gun when the time comes, and his ideal existence with Dad begins to crumble.
The writing by Josh Janowicz and the direction by Drew Mylrea perfectly capture the fascination of these survivalist end-of-the-world stories. Sure, Jake and Troy live on the precipice of death every day, and a single virus may put them out of business — but doesn’t life look so calm out there in those lovely icy woods? Don’t you admire Jake and Troy’s ability to live in peace with nature and their own primitive instincts? Don’t you wish you could forego modern life’s false pleasures and frenetic frivolities in favor of going to bed feeling you accomplished something merely by living to see another day?
After seducing the audience with those ideas, Last Survivors peels back the sheen to reveal the toxic impulses that underpin them: misanthropy, misogyny, and a misplaced obsession with purity and simplicity at the expense of compassion and connection. It sounds like pragmatic self-sufficiency the first time we hear Troy’s belief that there is no such thing as luck, only preparedness; after hearing him rail against the evils of late human civilization a few too many times, we start to wonder what he thinks of all the dead people who simply ran out of luck. Last Survivors feels most focused and deliberate in this thematic throughline.
However, these ideas take time to evolve, and Last Survivors commits some important errors along the way. It’s evident from the start that there’s a secret about what happened during the end of the world that needs to be revealed. However, the red flags are so many and large that they become distracting, especially when some of them begin to point to even larger red herrings. I was distracted for much of the first two acts by a single line of dialogue implying that Jake is unfamiliar with plastic, despite the fact that no plastic has decomposed in the 20 years since the catastrophe. I’m still not sure if it was meant to be a hint or if it was just a case of clumsy writing.
The film’s awkwardness is particularly evident in the protagonist’s situation. Jake’s sheltered, almost infantile upbringing with his father is documented: Of course, he agrees with his father on everything because he’s never been exposed to any other possibilities. Jake, on the other hand, is neither a boy, a teenager, or even a very young guy. The naiveté that may be endearing or tragic in a younger child reads as perplexing or even scary in a figure who appears to be closer to middle age than an adolescent, raising yet another nagging doubt about Jake’s age. (He is eventually revealed to be around 25, which makes more sense than Van Acker’s age of 35, according to IMDb.)
That is, in part, the point. We’re supposed to understand that Jake’s upbringing has hampered him in ways he can’t even begin to comprehend. Last Survivors, on the other hand, doesn’t delve deeply enough into either the tragedy or the horror of his situation. His feelings for Henrietta are ambiguous, as he appears to consider her as both a mother figure and a sexual interest; in the meantime, his developing dispute with his father reveals some shocking facts. Despite being confronted with two circumstances that would make any therapist exclaim, “a lot to process here,” Last Survivors skates right over them in search of more simple sentiment, which is accentuated by David Deutsch’s brooding score.
Last Survivors can’t be accused of being careless; it’s clearly a picture with a lot on its mind, keen to confront the gnarly roots of its own appeal. However, its apprehension prevents it from taking the more difficult, and maybe more rewarding, courses that have been put out in front of it. It’s a plot that has the potential for great terror, terrible misery, and a tangle of contradicting emotions that should put Jake, in particular, through the wringer. It then turns too rapidly to the light, rather than going further into the darkness. Perhaps that is a reasonable approach to life. However, as a movie, it’s a bit of a letdown.