Director/Screenplay – Benjamin Goodger, Producer – Bill Kenwright, Photography – Charlie Goodger, Music – Mario Grigorov & Matt Hill, Visual Effects – The Brewery (Supervisor – Marc Knapton), Production Design – Theo Boswell. Production Company – BK Studios.
Cast
Toby Goodger (Son), Luke Massy (Leader), Hannah Khalique-Brown (Girl), Duncan Lacroix (Father), Emma Cole (Lover), Tom Gaskin (Straggler), Alexander Anderson (Charger), King Gayle (Lieutenant), Joseph Coleman (Boy), Ellis Jones (Old Man)
Plot
It is ten years after the collapse of civilisation. The survivors are reduced to scrabbling for any supplies they can find, while some have resorted to cannibalism. A father, son and the son’s girlfriend live in a camouflaged shelter they have constructed in the woods. The girl is ill from a wound, but they find some pills that will help her. However, they are seen and attacked by a gang of marauders and the father killed. The son begins a desperate fight to retrieve the pills, but this has him hunted by the marauders.
Year 10 was a directorial debut for British director Benjamin Goodger, who had previously made a half-dozen short films.
Year 10 is a Post-Apocalyptic film. It belongs to the body of films that emerged following The Road (2009). In these, the previous post-holocaust works that derived from Mad Max 2 (1981) and adhered to action movie sensibilities gave to way to altogether more grim battles for individual survival. See other works in this vein such as Tooth and Nail (2007), The Book of Eli (2010), The Day (2011), The Well (2014), The Survivalist (2015) and The Domestics (2018).
There are surprise number of these works, including The Road, that see the only means of survival in this grim future being survivors resorting to Cannibalism. See also Tooth and Nail, The Book of Eli, The Day, Hell (2011), The Colony (2013), The Bad Batch (2015) and The Domestics. Year 10 raises cannibalism in its promotion and the opening title cards. The disappointment is that for all that the film raises the issue of cannibalism it never actually employs it – you can speculate that that is why the Boy is imprisoned and that what might be the fate of the Father, but nothing is made any more clear than that.
Luke Massy as as the leader of the marauders
There are surprising similarities between Year 10 and Azrael (2024), which came out six months earlier the same year. Both films are works set in a post-apocalyptic world, although offer no explanations for what caused the collapse of society. Most uniquely, both films take place without a single word of dialogue (although Azrael has some in unsubtitled Esperanto). In Azrael, we are told that this was part of a religious cult, although there is no explanation here as to why people seem to have lost the capacity of speech in the space of ten years. This does remind Luc Besson’s first film Le Dernier Combat (1983) where a change in atmosphere has caused people to no longer be able to speak.
Benjamin Goodger adopts a terse no-nonsense approach. As in The Road, it is a film of a desperate scrabble for things that seem pitifully small and even trivial to us – a packet of biscuits, a tray of pills – but are amplified to desperate, world-shattering importance by the world we are in. What I also liked a good deal about the film is its scavenged, hand-crafted look, particularly the camouflaged shelter in the woods and outdoor latrine. You become quite absorbed in the fight for survival in the initial scenes and then as Toby Goodger is forced out of his shelter and in pursuit of the gang of marauders. Things even out into quite a bit of running around after that point but come together in a sharp and suitably ironic ending.
