Cover Art

Credits

Director: David Hemmings Starring: Robert Powell, Jenny Agutter, Joseph Cotton, Angela Punch McGregor, Peter Sumner Screenplay: David Ambrose Music: Brian May Tagline: Pilot error…or supernatural terror? Only one man can tell! Country: Australia

Suffering from post-traumatic amnesia, Keller tries desperately to come to terms with the fact he was the only survivor. Aided by Hobbs (Jenny Agutter), a psychic who seems attuned to his plight, Keller is forced by her to face up to a grim reality as his memories come flooding back.

Based on the novel by James Herbert, The Survivor should have been a highly disturbing supernatural thriller questioning the dark vagaries of fate and cosmic justice. While Herbert's novel diluted the impact with his penchant for gruesome text, the screenplay for the film flounders at the opposite end of the spectrum with an overabundance of mood-enhancing sequences, short-sharp-shocks and sentimental imagery. As a result, the pacing drags, characters react rather than act and shots of a charred doll, for example, are distracting to the point where the viewer is left feeling disconnected with the narrative flow. Moreover, a number of plot points are simply left hanging by a thread, dangling and begging for an explanation. Like, just who was that woman slashed to pieces in the photographer's dark room?

In its favour, the actors play their respective roles with intense, if not at times, histrionic abandon (see Jenny Agutter's possession sequence) and the cinematographer barely wastes a moody frame. Some scenes also manage to raise the hairs on the back the neck, like the eerie photographs of burned faces and fleeting shots of terrified victims during the well-edited opening crash sequence.