Brittany Ashworth | Through the Shattered Lens

The world is ending and you’re stuck in the desert. The vehicle you were driving has flipped over. You’ve got a severely broken leg and can’t move. The few remaining humans in the city have informed you that a rescue party will not be sent out until the sun rises. And you’ve got a deformed creature circling your crashed van, trying to find a way to enter. You have to figure out how to survive the night while being hunted by some sort of mutant and you also have to mentally work out your relationship issues while doing so.

(It may sound like a nightmare but if you ever break up with someone while on a road trip through South Texas and then you have to ask that person to give you a ride home, it can be a reality. Not that I’m speaking for personal experience, of course….)

That’s the situation in which Juliet (Brittany Ashworth) finds herself in the 2017 French film, Hostile. While Juliet tries to survive the night, she flashes back to the life and the world she used to know. She remembers how she was once a nearly illiterate drug addict who met and fell in love with an art gallery owner named Jack (Grégory Fitoussi). After discussing the paintings of Francis Bacon and the role of fate in everyone’s life, Jack took it on himself to lock Juliet in an apartment until she overcame her addiction. Now, that’s not something that most professionals would necessarily recommend trying, especially when the addict and the apartment owner barely know one another. In fact, I felt it was a bit presumptuous on Jack’s part. Who is Jack to decide that he’s going to be the one to save Juliet’s life? Jack may think that his intentions are good but there’s something a bit too self-righteous and controlling about Jack, even if he is trying to keep someone from self-destructing. He’s every preachy Intervention producer come to life. He’s someone who most viewers will feel a bit of ambiguity about.

The audience might not be totally comfortable with what Jack does but, for Juliet and Jack, it all works out and they fall in love. Juliet remembers the good times with Jack and she also remembers how their relationship eventually fell apart and how the world itself eventually started to end, almost as if their relationship issues were a bit of a metaphor for the fragility of society. Meanwhile, the creature outside the van continues to try to find its way inside.

Hostile is a claustrophobic and atmospheric end-of-the-world thriller from director Mathieu Turi. The inside of that van is a properly ominous location and it’s impossible not to sympathize with Juliet as she struggles to figures out how to survive the night. The film’s deliberate pace takes some getting used to and the final twist requires a certain suspension of disbelief but both Ashworth and Fitoussi are well-cast as Juliet and Jack. In the end, the film is a moody and interesting look at the end of the world, albeit one that is marred by the heavy-handedness of its script.

One year ago, Kelly (Brittany Ashworth) and her boyfriend, Luca (Talha Senturk), were climbing a mountain in Italy. It was a great experience, until Luca put his foot on the wrong part of the mountain and promptly plunged to his death.

Now, on the anniversary of Luca’s fatal fall, Kelly and her friend Sophie (Anias Parello) are planning on climbing the mountain in his memory. However, the night before their scheduled climb, they meet four friends. Josh (Ben Lamb), Zach (Louis Boyer), Taylor (David Wayman), and Reynolds (Nathan Welsh) have known each other since they were kids. They grew up together. They went to high school and college together. Now, they still go on weekend trips together, hoping to hold onto some remnant of their disappearing youth. They’re a tightly-knit group, even though Zach, Taylor, and Reynolds seem to be a bit weary of Josh.

Josh invites Kelly and Sophie to hang out with the group. Kelly, who is still mourning Luca, quickly grows disgusted with Josh’s overbearing and toxic personality. Leaving Sophie behind, Kelly returns to her cabin to get some sleep. When Sophie doesn’t return to the cabin, Kelly steps outside to look for her and discovers and films the four men tossing Sophie over the edge of a cliff.

With the men now pursuing her, Kelly has no choice but to climb the mountain from which Luca previously fell. The men chase after her, reaching the top of the mountain before her and leaving Kelly trapped between the rocks below and Josh above. Josh says that he just wants the camera but Kelly knows that there’s no way Josh is going to let her escape the mountain alive.

There’s a slightly interesting idea at the heart of The Ledge. While Josh is, from the start, an obvious sociopath, the other three men are portrayed with a bit more ambiguity. All three of them know that Josh is dangerous and, when Josh initially kills Sophie, all three of them initially resist his demands that they help him cover up what has happened. In the end, though, all three of them set aside their qualms and literally get blood on their hands. Taking as individuals, Taylor, Zach, and Reynolds are all level-headed and even likable but none of them are willing to stand up to Josh and, when they get together as a group, only Reynolds is the only one to weakly protest their actions. Even though Zach, Taylor, and Reynolds are not as vicious as Josh, they all became complicit in his actions when they decided that their loyalty to the group was more important than doing the right thing. As such, it doesn’t matter that Zach has a family or that Taylor initially tried to calm Josh down. It doesn’t even matter that the guilt-stricken Reynolds, at one point, allows Kelly to run past him rather than attempt to capture her. For all of the guilt that they feel as a result of their actions, Taylor, Zach, and Reynolds are all complicit because none of them were willing to do the right thing from the start. The fact that they don’t do more to stop Josh make them just as guilty as he is.

As I said, it’s an interesting idea but the film doesn’t really do much with it. Indeed, once Kelly starts to climb that mountain, the narrative gets bogged down with flashbacks to her relationship with Luca and scenes of Josh shouting insults at her while she climbs. The film features some striking shots and Brittany Ashworth is a likable lead but the narrative momentum stalls out early. It turns out that there’s only so much time you can spend watching one person climb and one person yell until your attention starts to wander elsewhere. Much like Luka, The Ledge gets off to a promising enough start but then loses its grip and falls back to Earth.