If you want to be a great action thriller director, I would direct you to a fitness instructor for advice. Keep it lean, and tighten it up! The Decline is going to be one of the poster children for how to pull that off. Clocking in just under 90 minutes, this movie is riveting beginning to end. And chilling, literally and figuratively.
The Decline opens in the middle of the night, with Antoine (Guillaume Laurin) jarring awake his daughter, frantically getting her dressed and in the car in preparation for some future world ending cataclysm. A doomsday prepper in Montreal, Antoine watches videos of his mentor Alain (Réal Bossé) religiously, learning tips on how to survive anything. After reaching out to Alain, Antoine gets invited to Alain’s remote compound with other doomsday preppers like Rachel (Marie-Evelyne Lessard) and David (Marc Beaupré) as part of a survival class. However, something goes wrong at the compound, forcing these already paranoid people to start questioning each other’s allegiances. Scared, paranoid people with guns? Certainly a potent recipe for something explosive to happen.
Like Antoine, who times his daughters emergency preparedness at age 6ish, The Decline is all about ruthless efficiency. Every one of the 83 minutes is crammed with something meaningful or important. The first 10 sets up who Antoine and Alain, their relationship to one another, and through doomsday prepping gives us an idea of their characters. Over the next 20, we meet the rest of the prepper novices through brisk means as well: krav magaw ex-soldier fighting a twitchy trigger happy survivalist, well meaning but unwoke simpleton who struggles skinning rabbits, you get the idea. Those characters are then forced into conflict with one another, debating potential scenarios that you know foreshadow what’s coming next. So by the half hour mark, we’re ready to really kick the plot into gear with people we know, some we care about, and some we don’t. Awesome.
Then, with that ruthless efficiency, The Decline plunges us into the action. Director Patrice Laliberté uses blunt force trauma and shock, then dials it back to establish the tension again, and builds to another shock. The tension is set up, again, really well in the first half hour, basically planting some people in a booby-trapped foreign locale, trying to navigate quickly and cautiously to avoid pursuit. Where the script shines most is in the big shocking moments: it lulls us into a sense of normalcy or stasis, and really delivers unexpectedly: I gasped each time, almost every 20 minutes or so at the bold storytelling, taking big risks with some of their shocking moments, hoping the audience will go along, like I totally did.
Normally I’m hesitant with American remakes of foreign films, but The Decline would perfectly translate to a certain subset of the American population, ready to disassociate from society and unclear how to build it back together again: survivors, but not livers. But unlike the tight, lean French, the American version would probably be bloated and meander where it wants to go.