Hostile (2018)

A strangely compelling yet uneven film telling two stories, one about a stranded and wounded women who tries to survive the night in a post-apocalyptic world, the other about a man and a woman meet and fall in love.

The post-apocalyptic story would've worked best on it's own, and the love story is kind of a distraction if you are looking for a post-apocalypse film. The love story works well within the frame work of the post-apocalypse drama, but it's not often that people who like genre films will enjoy a straight romantic drama added into the mix. I personally thought the two stories worked well together, but the film had several faults.

First off some of the acting was a bit dodgy, mainly in the love story. I didn't always completely believe the love between the two leads, especially from Grégory Fitoussi. Brittany Ashworth who plays Juliette was much better, especially in the post-apoc story.

One of the other big problems was trying to understand what connected the two stories. I spent most of the film guessing grand twists, and was disappointed when the twist was actually really small and a bit silly. The classic problem with films that straddle the before and after of an extinction level event is you have to give enough time for the story to naturally play out. Instead in the film it seems like society completely collapses into a desert waste land in about 18 months.

It's like films that are set 15 years in the future. Your audience will watch the film now and in 15 years point out all the things that haven't come to pass, let's call it the Back to the Future effect. And this is one of the flaws of this film, Juliette doesn't look significantly aged enough for this future to be as bad as it is. Not enough time can possibly pass for the world to completely fall apart. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it took me out of the film a lot.

All in all, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

6/10