Year 10

After the fall of civilization, a young man confronts a violent tribe of cannibals who have murdered his father and stolen the medicine that keeps his girlfriend alive.

Like Flow and Invisible Raptor, Year 10 was one of the movies that was playing at the Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival that I would have liked to have seen, but I missed my chance for one reason or another. They're all streaming now, so I'm catching up.

The film begins with a couple of lines of ominous text:

It was all over in a day. At first, the living ate the dead. By Year 10, the living ate the living.

Set in a brutal world, long after the collapse of society, with its broken and overgrown remnants slowly rusting into the ground all around them, it's obvious from the start that this is the kind of place where a single mistake, a single moment of carelessness, can wreck your entire life.

And that is exactly what happens to a young man and his father as they are out hunting. While rifling through the wrecks of some long-abandoned cars, the young man accidentally lays on one of the car horns, and now everyone in the area knows that they're there.

Soon enough, a small family of vicious raiders find their trail and follow them home, quickly discovering their little hovel hidden beneath its screen of branches and brush. While the young man and his sickly girlfriend hide in the foul waters of their outhouse's shit pit, his father is killed, his body dragged away to be devoured, and their small cache of supplies is looted and stolen, including the medicine his sickly girlfriend depends on. With no other choice, the young man must track down the raiders and steal back the medicine, or his girlfriend will die.

Once you're past that set-up, the film is mostly a series of events where you find yourself going: “c'mon, man… just get the fuck out of there,” over and over again, while the young man is either taking too many ridiculous and unnecessary risks, or he is taking for-fucking-ever while he's sneaking around the bad guys' camp, or he is just plain fucking up somehow and like... trips on a bunch of noisy shit or something.

Even worse, sometimes he just doesn't pay attention, like he forgets that a bunch of post-apocalyptic hillbilly savages are chasing him. Honestly, most of the events in this film seem to happen because the young man's choices only ever leave a trail of destruction behind him that only harms other people.

It’s a stressful film, and often more than a little aggrivating.

A small budget survival horror thriller set in a post-apocalyptic world, this is yet another film that is largely silent except for grunting and whimpers. I don't know why either. Unlike Azrael, or Sasquatch Summer, or Hundreds of Beavers, or Out of Darkness, or even Polaris, there doesn't seem to be a narrative reason for why there is no dialogue in this film. The characters just... don't speak, other than wordess exclamations. I don’t get this choice. Did the entire cast turn out to have terrible speaking voices? OR... is this a foreign film, and they were just trying to avoid the translation costs?

Whatever the reason, one thing the film did do a good job of, is the story is setting. I don't know where Year 10 was filmed exactly, but it really was an excellant choice for portraying a broken-down world, especially if you wanted it to look like it's stuck in the kind of perpetual damp late fall that should be familiar to anyone from the hilly river valley country of the upper midwest. Everything in this film looks muddy and frigid. Everything is wet. You can almost feel the wind as it chafes your cheeks, and the freezing tingle on your reddened fingers.

So that works at least.

The question of how exactly the world ended is never specifically answered, but honestly, it doesn't give a "Year 10" feeling as much as it gives a "three paychecks away from where we are now" feeling. Either way, it's believable that this is a world were nothing and no one is good, and everyone only ever takes. Even our hero steals pants, shoes, and a jacket from a child and a bed-ridden old man.

Overall better than I expected, but still nothing to write home about, especially as the ending drags on too long, Year 10 is better than just "fine" but maybe not worth actively hunting down. If you like this kind of thing and it's convenient moment for you to watch it, you could do worse.

But also… you could definitely do better.