Be warned. This is not an easy movie to watch. It's the story of a group of people who have survived a nuclear attack and are sealed up in an underground bunker. Essentially that's the story, with one minor (as it turns out) addition that presents a problem with the movie as I'll note later. It's not pleasant to watch. Basically, the group, suffering from radiation poisoning and closed off from everything except each other, starts to go mad; more and more deranged with the passage of time - turning on each other without mercy, in at least one particularly disturbing subplot, a couple of men using one of the female survivors as a sexual toy. I say again - it is not a pleasant movie to watch. Disturbing and at times quite gory. Not for those easily offended.
However, if you can get over the uneasy squeamishness that the story brings forth - it's not bad. There's even a sort of uneasy reality to it. After all, how would any of us survive or even hold it together in the same circumstances. Nothing that happens here seems beyond the capacity of normal human beings as time passes in this situation. That's probably the most disturbing thing about this. It's not impossible to read yourself into this situation and wonder whether you could handle it any better.
The performances from the cast were decent. I was familiar with Lauren German as paramedic Leslie Shay on the TV show "Chicago Fire" - but in all honesty I didn't recognize her as Eva, who's probably the main character in this movie. But she, along with everyone else in the cast, did a fine job in their roles - perhaps a bit over the top at times, but that seemed in keeping with the basic story and dilemma that characters were facing. The ending of the movie was kind of unexpected and incredibly sobering as well in the last scene, looking out at the nuclear-devastated skyline of the city.
The one part of the movie that confused me and in the end that seemed unnecessary was the "lab" up above and the "soldiers" (if that's what they were) that raided the bunker and carried off young Wendy. I didn't think it added anything to the story aside from a few minutes of suspense that weren't really necessary to add, and, in the end, it was left hanging. What was the purpose of the lab? Who was running the lab? I've seen speculation in some of the other reviews on here, but I don't believe anything definitive was ever stated in the movie. As far as I know it was just left hanging - open to speculation, I suppose, but with nothing definitive to base the speculation on.
Again - it's unpleasant, disturbing, gory. It's a very dark exploration of human psychology. And yet I found it quite riveting. (7/10)
