The Divide, the latest film from young French director Xavier Gens, opens in chaotic desolation. Amid fast, shaky visuals that mimic that of Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield, a riot occurs with people screaming and running frantically inside an apartment building. Outside the walls, nuclear missiles totally obliterate New York City. It’s a preview of what is to come: a bleak vision muddled by uneven form and a hopeless depiction of humanity.
This opening sequence culminates with Mickey (Michael Biehn), the authoritative apartment supervisor, closing the doors of his personal fallout shelter, in which he and a group of tenants fight to survive. The group includes step brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes), their friend Bobby (Michael Eklund), a mother (Rosanna Arquette) and her young daughter (Abbey Thickson), a black man named Delvin (Courtney B. Vance), and Ivan (Lauren German), a beautiful young woman, and her passive fiance, Sam (Ivan Gonzalez).
Initially, these individuals struggle to get along, but a collective gratefulness for life trumps their differences. As time passes, though, and hope dwindles—particularly after the food supply runs low and the enemy welds the doors of their shelter shut—the group’s unity begins to disintegrate. Trust is lost, and paranoia settles in.
At this point, The Divide shifts direction. What started as sci-fi drama quickly turns into sci-fi horror. Such unevenness becomes apparent when Marilyn, the middle-aged mother, moves from lamenting the abduction of her daughter to slipping off her clothes and offering up her body to Bobby. Changing genres erratically, with a swift shift into darkness, Gens seemingly becomes so determined to portray the inherent depravity of his characters that he disregards narrative transition, which in turn triggers the film’s free fall into bleakness.
This bleakness, alas, only intensifies when the story suddenly goes Lord of the Flies on the viewer. Before we know it, people are being murdered, and Bobby and Josh take charge as the corrupt new leaders. They control the food supply and force Marilyn to become their sex slave.
Because Gens never fully develops the characters and rushes his depiction of the slide toward despair, the wicked nature of the antagonists and their actions bears no believability. Josh, in fact, transitions from hero to villain within just a few scenes. At first, he appears noble, volunteering to leave the shelter for a rescue mission. Soon after that experience, he becomes disgruntled and tortures Mickey out of vengeance, only to later carry out even more demented acts.
The contrived urgency that weakens Gens’ film also verifies his vision for it. Working from a script by Eron Sheean and Karl Mueller, he highlights the dark and fallen state of humankind and shows a distrust in humanity at large. As even Ivan, the sole protagonist of the story, falls short of good and proves herself susceptible to evil, The Divide seems to suggest that all people, especially the males, are monsters, especially when placed in dire circumstances.
Such belief, particularly for this viewer, holds little value or merit in the name of art or entertainment. But even for those who concur with Gens’ vision, the movie is still sadly lacking. Uneven in tone and plot, populated by substandard performances, and possessed of a shoddy technical quality, the only thing great about The Divide is the hole it digs for itself.
Director: Xavier Gens
Writer: Karl Mueller & Eron Sheean
Starring: Michael Biehn, Lauren German & Jennifer Blanc
Release Date: Jan. 13, 2012