Survive ( Survivre ) is a new French science fiction thriller available on digital platforms from 30th September.

Survive directed by Frederic Jardin boasts an excellent high concept.  A youngish, healthy family consisting of oceanographer father Tom (Andreas Pietschmann), doctor mother Julia (Emilie Dequenne), their daughter Cassie (Lisa Delamar) and son Ben (Lucas Ebel) are taking a boating holiday off the coast of Cuba.  They fall victim to a potential extinction event when a meteor shower reverses the polarity of Earth’s poles, with water leaving the oceans and flooding the highlands.  The family find themselves on the now-dry ocean floor and face various dangers including the flesh-hungry creatures ‘from the abyss’ promised in the publicity.

The film’s success in realizing the tantalizing prospect of the flipped environment will be discussed later.  However, the first half of the film diverges from this concept, concentrating on the family’s run-in with a psychotic drifter (Arben Bajraktaraj) who pursues them across the landscape.  Where this madman and his dog have come from is unclear, especially as the family have been far out at sea and it’s only a day since the ocean disappeared.  Do slasher-type killers go on long sea voyages with their pets?  On the level of cinematic expectation, it’s like buying a ticket for the Towering Inferno and getting Cape Fear.  The section does deliver decent thrills, pitched somewhere between Dead Calm and Haute Tension.

When we get to the meat of the film where the surviving family members traverse the landscape hoping to meet up with friendly survivor Nao (Olivier Ho Hio Hen) who has a workable submersible and it won’t be long before the polarities change again, the film’s success on delivering on its promise will depend on each viewer’s subjective judgement.  Personally, I felt very disappointed.  In real life the bottom of the ocean floor is heaving with exotic fauna and flora, much of it still undocumented.  Surely much would have been left after the polarity change?  However, what we see here resembles a dry-as-bone Sierra (which it probably is) and the only remains of animal life a few dead fish, a dead shark and eventually some nifty shoals of large CG crabs driven into a homicidal frenzy by their inability to process oxygen.  But if your most interesting threat are crabs?  Beyond the little evidence of animal life, the surface is home to, in perhaps an ecological statement, hazardous material drums and various types of plastic waste including office chairs (?).  As a dramatic environment, it is both unlikely and unconvincing.

I may be being too hard on the movie to realize a convincing environment since these shortcomings are as much due to budgetary constraints as imaginative shortcomings.  However, the unconvincing setting militates against the success of the film’s actually effective aspects (and acting, practical and digital effects and especially the stunning photography of the locations are all strong).

The film’s core concept is one worth revisiting but only with enough financial and imaginative resources to meet the challenge.