After "It Comes At Night" had absolutely nothing come at night, i'm getting sick of these moody post-apocalyptic dramas with titles that are completely wrong or misleading as to the actual content of the movie.
the movie at the start is about a single father with two young adult daughters, Nell and Eva, living in a house out in the woods on the west coast. Then there's a catastrophic power outage that ends up being far worse than a random outage.
While the concept is broad enough not to be based on anything already written, it reminded me very strongly of the novel by William Forstchen "One Second After", about a father and his two young girls living in a small town in the Carolinas when a massive EMP event hits and they have to go months without power.
The novel, which supposedly Newt Gingritch said inspired him to talk about the threat of EMP attacks on the US power grid, was incredibly written and dealt with a lot of the dangerous issues to be dealt with without any sort of electricity, including one of his daughters being diabetic and them having to constantly scour and barter for insulin and ice, while maintaining some manner of stability in the community.
This movie does absolutely none of that. The father dies due to an inexplicable accident in which he is apparently wasting gasoline using a chainsaw to cut down a tree for firewood, only to have it come apart and saw his leg and he bleeds out. This leaves the two daughters to survive for many months in their house hidden away in the woods without power.
There's never any real danger. They have a seemingly endless supply of clean water, enough not just to drink but to bathe and shave with regularity, and an even more endless supply of rice and beans that not only lasts them many many months, but lasts them throughout having Nell's boyfriend over for several days as well.
They somehow continue to maintain the house for over a year, doing nothing but chopping firewood and going on with Nell studying and Eva practicing dancing. The only threat from people in town is when a random shopkeep they'd met earlier shows up to rape Eva and leave.
At the end, suddenly the house is seeing huge pieces collapse due to black mold, and with Eva having a baby, she decides not only can she not live in the moldy house anymore but she wants to use the last of their gasoline to set it on fire and leave.
I don't know how to handle a mold outbreak in a house, but in a post-apocalyptic setting where there's been no electricity in virtually the entire country for over a year, and no communication with the outside world beyond rumor, I think ditching and burning down a huge house that has gone 15 months without being raided or even discovered by potential bandits and looters is suicide.
Another reviewer put it simply and truly; they would die very quickly in the real world. Even if we could believe that they had a perfect house with a huge supply of food and water that lasted them 15 months, they'd end up dead within days after scuttling it and going out on their own without any food or supplies or shelter and a newborn baby.
