Directed by: Xavier Gens
Written by: Karl Mueller, Eron Sheean
Featuring Michael Biehn, Michael Eklund, Milo Ventimiglia
The Divide has a lot of dualities. Here’s one: Most people will loathe this film. I loved it.
Director of The Divide, Xavier Gens, takes a lot of risks. For most audiences and in many ways, the dice come up snake eyes for him. Errors are abundant.
But for a filmgoer like myself, obsessed with Apocalypse Now and in love with the gutsy attitude of grindhouse film, The Divide hits a symphony of right notes. I forgave its many sins because it was so bold in displaying humanity’s.
The Divide is a bad horror film. It just happens to be a great bad horror film. Buy into the themes and you get your return on investment. They’re obvious enough from the premise: Disparate survivors of the nuclear annihilation of Manhattan are locked in a bomb shelter and degenerate into a bestial community of the doomed.
Think Heart of Darkness in a radioactive basement. Expect Masque of the Red Death in the rotten core of the Big Apple. The characters in The Divide drink, fight and fuck, for tomorrow they die.
That’s all The Divide was aiming for, and Xavier Gens knew just to how to inspire the performances to pull it off. According to Michael Biehn, who plays Mickey, the ultra-right survivalist antihero of The Divide, Gens put total creative control in his actors. Plot lines tracing the rise and fall of each were left up to the players.
It’s no surprise that this kind of cinema verité approach produces some intense and raw performances. To hear Biehn tell it, the greatest specimens of agony were crafted by actors who exercised the freest rein: Michael Eklund's Bobby and Milo Ventimiglia's Josh. The tragic delight to both characters was that they didn’t simply tailspin for the entire film. Josh and Bobby start the film as obnoxious hoodlums, but try to stand as saviors to the group when adversity knocks. It’s only when they’re crushed under the burden of responsibility in sinking circumstances that they plummet into perversion.
There’s plenty of perversion to go around by the time The Divide hits its second act. Here again, Xavier Gens proves his salt with unflinching depravity and graphic pain. Relentless use of close-focus shots and sophisticated performances gives the film an exquisite claustrophobia.
All this amounts to an intensely uncomfortable experience. The audience is mired in moral devolution and all that goes with it — primitive sexual relations, torture and humiliation, the raw dynamic of domination. As if this weren’t already enough to affront most audiences, Gens takes things a step further by wrapping his lean plot thread around a core of total nihilism: The Divide never gives cause or closure to the monstrosities happening outside the shelter.
This choice is the worst offense to our ordered minds. We never discover why the nuclear bomb went off. We are never told why the American government reacts in the inhuman way that’s shown. We are given little of our characters’ histories that would explain their descent into barbarity. With the exception of the 9/11-connected backstory of Mickey, Michael Biehn’s creation, their motivations are matters solely of the moment.
The result is a cramped and hollow experience. The Divide shuts us in with unanswered questions as much as it does with a welded door and dwindling supplies. And this is where even seasoned grindhouse fans might find themselves shaking their heads in disappointment.
If such plot holes unravel the experience for the viewer, technical faults in The Divide can rip it apart. Xavier Gens uses slow-motion shots with melodramatic overkill. Special effects can so artificial as to be eye-roll inducing. Worst of all, they’re used to get a message across to the audience rather than support the reality of the story. Villainous characters wilt with radiation poisoning faster than others and heart-monitor beeping speeds at inexplicable moments. Internal logic breaks down and it can break the film.
The Divide adds up to an extremely brutal film — for the audience as much as the characters. It is crude in execution and zealous in its central theme of nihilism. Fans of Xavier Gens’ Frontier[s] will find this an ideal model of his distinct craft. Audiences craving a conventional post-apocalyptic will be sorely disappointed, and I do mean sore. All the comforts of narrative are abolished.
The Divide splits the audience: Embrace emptiness or be left wondering why it was ever made.
