Survive

A hybrid disaster flick in which a French-American family gets caught out on the high seas, but then planetary realignment results in a desert trek. Low-budget and low-concept, but thrilling enough.

Disaster flicks seem to make a comeback every decade or two, nowadays often centered around climate change. “Survive” is low-budget and low-concept, but thrilling enough.

It also has the distinction of being a hybrid disaster movie: first on the high seas, but then it turns into a harrowing desert trek.

The premise is that the Earth’s magnetic poles have suddenly reversed for unexplained reasons, in what is supposed to the planet’s sixth mass extinction event — and this time, we’re the dinosaurs.

A French-American family is out enjoying some fun and sun in the Caribbean aboard their modest yacht. After surviving the resulting storm, they find themselves at the bottom of the now-emptied oceans, which have been turned into a veritable wasteland just this side of the Mad Max movies.

There’s a great shot of their boat perched on the edge of a high cliff overlooking a barren plain, like some misfit toy snatched up by a titan and cast up there for funsies.

Directed by Frédéric Jardin (“Sleepless Night”) from a screenplay by Alexandre Coquelle and Mathieu Oullion, the film is about 50/50 in French and English. It’s being released in theaters in some markets Friday, but your best chance of catching it in Indiana and most places will be on VOD on the usual streaming platforms.

Émilie Dequenne and Andreas Pietschmann play the parents, Julia and Tom, a French doctor and German oceanographer transplanted long ago to Miami. Their kids are thoroughly Americanized, lacking the accents of either mom or pop: Ben (Lucas Ebel), who is celebrating his 13th birthday as the story opens, and Cassie (Lisa Delamar), who I’m guessing is a couple years older.

Both the sea and land portions play out as completely different movie experiences. You’ve got the vague shadowy threat of sharks or other undersea critters nipping at Julia’s toes when she goes out for a swim. The mood is paranoid and tense. In fact their biggest challenge comes from whales, which damage the ship’s propeller. Tom is mystified as to why their mayday radio calls go unanswered.

Then comes the big storm, followed by the entry into the new challenge of surviving in a place with little food or water. They do manage to make contact with a Chinese science submersible, and its survivor (Olivier Ho Hio Hen) warns the oceans will return suddenly in a few days, swallowing them all.

He agrees to help them — but only two will fit. Tom and Julia have to figure out how to make it many miles on foot to their salvation without letting the kids know the ultimate outcome.

Then a strange, bewildered man (Arben Bajraktaraj) with a black dog and carrying a makeshift harpoon — he is literally credited as L'homme au harpon — comes wandering out of the desert, possibly attracted by the birthday balloons Ben reconfigured as a signal for help.

And suddenly the family has to face the prospect of other humans being their biggest threat. So it becomes a tense action/thriller.

Later there are a couple of epic fights with some emboldened crustaceans, rendered via some pretty godawful CGI. I try not to rag on low-budget movies for not having the cash for better effects, but I’ve seen more alive-looking crabs at the Asian buffet. Jardin wisely tries to shoot around this limitation, using chittering sounds to build the sense of threat. It works, a bit.

The family tries to stick by the ethos of the analytical Tom: “Every problem has a solution.” Well, not really. I’m not sure what the answer is to the entire world reversing its magnetic polarity.

I’m also kinda doubtful any human life could survive such an event in the first place. And I must say the bottom of the ocean looks just like any standard-issue land desert — no forests of seaweed, masses of fish carcasses or other stuff we’d expect to see. There is a surfeit of plastic garbage and other human detritus, clearly included as a not-so-subtle environmental message.

In the end, “Survive” is just a straightforward existential disaster movie. I recognized its limitations while finding it hard to deny some genuine entertainment quotient.