mike | 16 Sep 2011 | 309 Views | 1 Likes | 0 Dislikes

TIFF MM Review: The Day

10 years after whatever unnamed calamity ended civilization as we know it, a plucky band of hardened survivors trudge across what was once America, heading somewhere, avoiding someone. There are no animals or bugs left, food is scarce, ammunition scarcer, and those whittled few who remain to scratch out a life are haunted by the scars of the past. And they're really dirty, and all of their clothes are taped to them.

That's the setup of Doug Aarniokoski's grim post-apocalyptic thriller The Day. Five survivors - four friends-turned-"family" and a silent, brooding outsider (Ashley Bell) - must against all their best instincts hole up inside an abandoned farmhouse. Thinking that they may have at long last found a place to put down roots, they soon realize that it is in fact where they must take a stand.

In the post-apoc genre, another film arrived (also having played TIFF) a few years ago like a meteorite: The Road, John Hillcoat's film version of Cormac McCarthy's novel. It's perhaps the saddest apocalypse movie, conjuring forth a forbidding, all-pervading atmosphere of suffocating ash and gloom and death out of brief flashes and allusions to the horrifying violence that occurs as people begin to eat each other. The Day could be another story from that same ashy world, except where The Road was interested in its characters and the progression of a father/son relationship, The Day is interested in the bloody politics and gory details of the meat-getting process.

Unfortunately, the film also tries very hard to be about characters, arranging the ugly digital bloodfest action pieces around a character who ostensibly has some kind of personal growing to do. It's unconvincing, and it makes the action around it seem pointless and gross where it could be visceral and thrilling had the filmmakers not laden the whole thing down with a load of ersatz emotion. It's a "cake and eat it too" problem, trying to combine the profundity and emotion of McCarthy's story with the cool-dudette brutal murder-efficiency of the Resident Evil franchise, say, and it just doesn't quite work.

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