Five episodes, all shot in one take, five different situations in an escalation.
This was so tense it actually gave Chernobyl a match, with much much lesser means. Episode 1 is the weakest, because of the acting, but it already sets the mood : extreme paranoïa, and survival of the fittest!
That was quite an achivement in horror in its purest sense. Highly recomended!
Edit : Episodes 6-8 are on the same model, but add some interconnectivity between some storylines, to great effect.
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This excellently made short series is atmospherically dense like Black Mirror. But it's not about the consequences of technological development. At least not directly. But about the collapse of the social order, the survival of people while everything around them no longer exists.
Each individual episode represents a certain period of time, e.g. episode 7, which shows a woman surviving 50 days after the collapse of society (one of the best episodes, by the way). The exception is the last episode 8, which shows the events 5 days before the collapse.
A much too unknown series that left a deep impression on me. Unfortunately the series only consists of 8 episodes, each about 15-25 minutes short. The short duration of the episodes is an advantage when designing a captivating episode. I hope there will be a new season with more episodes at some point. With episodes this short, there should be at least 15 episodes.
In terms of production (camera, editing, lighting, sound / music), the consequences are all equal and well done. This is an example of what the European film industry can offer.
Presumably some self-proclaimed ''patriots'' (Neoliberals with great love for the rich) who are delusional will see this series as socialist propaganda. -
searchanddestroy-114 November 2019I am afraid that this kind of films and series will be here more and more in the future, as long as our world will continue to exist. The spirit of this no future thema series reminds me a French movie which I saw last week: L'HEURE DE LA SORTIE; The third episode of this show: THE AIRFIELD is so immoral with the lead bad guy making it at the end. The acting are not always excellent, but mostly OK enough for my taste. Audiences can easily feel empathy for most of the characters. But this is a true depressing series. US Tv industry would never make this kind of stuff, where there is no happy end at all. I love that. Each episode is made on the ONE TAKE mode. Very perilous to make, because one false move in terms of synchronism means to start all over again. This kind of situation, the end of the world, the civilization, is not impossible but fortunately highly improbable. But, if, IF that happened, I am not sure that, in reality, people would not behave like the characters here. I am not sure they would, but not sure either that they would not....
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danybur17 February 2021Abstract
Eight exciting chapters, eight moments and extreme situations derived from a sudden? crisis that leaves the planet without supplies.
Review
Starting on J-Day, there is a sudden global collapse whereby the supply of food, energy and other inputs is cut off.
This French miniseries addresses in each chapter distressing situations that arise from that event whose nature we ignore.
But it does not do it in any way: each one of its nervous chapters lasts only around 20 minutes and is filmed in real time with a handheld camera and in a single sequence shot. And it is not a quirk of style: the dramatic effect is prodigious and the technical expertise in the realization in some is astonishing.
The series does not fall into the usual Manichean nihilism of apocalyptic dystopias because, although human miseries appear in each chapter, the result of desperation for survival, gestures of solidarity and collaboration are not absent either.
The situations dealt with are individual or collective, often dilemmatic, with very different locations, different characters (with very few exceptions and few links between them) and with strong social and class notes, but without falling into the cliché. Overall the pacing is distressing but never hysterical, and the filmmakers have a knack for making chapters quite different and with room for surprise.
Filmed in 2019, this dystopia directed by Jérémy Bernard, Guillaume Desjardins and Bastien Ughetto (who stars in one of the most terrifying episodes) is prescient in some aspects of the global coronavirus crisis and undoubtedly related to the prevailing capitalist modes of production.
Pay attention to the final titles of each chapter. If you pay attention, you will see that they are revealing. -
axvngey13 March 2021This is a great miniseries, comprised of 15-20 min long episodes.
Each episode is shot in one take, and this is a great achievement by itself. They are by no means static episodes - they don't take place inside a room, with people sitting down and talking. These are fast, action-packed episodes, where we follow people in different situations after the collapse of our economy and society. Thus, the planning and shooting of the series deserves the greatest credit.
What we take for granted every day in our civilized societies, the flow of goods and services, the civility of people themselves, depend on a great deal of interdependence and abundance of resources. Our global economy acts with the notion that we should grow and expand infinitely, buy more, consume more, and exploit the resources, the people and the world in the process.
We think this can never change. Actually, we don't think about it at all. We continue our roles assigned to us in our everyday lives.
The truth is that it all hangs by a thin thread. It can all change very easily and quickly.
We saw the prequel in the first days of Covid-19, when the supermarkets were depleted of goods, and people were actually fighting over the last items of food or toilet paper.
We depend on the cogs of the machine working perfectly, to survive.
This series gives an enlightening glimpse of how events may unfold when the system stops functioning one day. Recommended. -
bcnkor19 April 2022But how? This series explains it to you in different situations, and how it even affects children or handicapped people and how people react and worry about saving themselves or their closest relatives, and how in 5 minutes the ethics and morals of people It ends and from good you become bad.
This series explains a part of the truth because reality is higher than what they tell you, and you have the example of the twin towers in the United States, no one would have imagined that a plane would produce such a catastrophe.
Thousands of people in the world try to help improve things, but others do not, as shown in the television episode (episode number 8), fear and manipulation of information is the way people can be controlled . Things are done before they happen, not when all is lost. When everything around you falls, even if you don't want to, you go behind, even if you have power or money, they won't be saved either, because if there are 10 bad people and 1 good one, over time the majority will go for the minority, even if they hide in a bunker or on an island. Either we all rise or we all fall, there is no middle ground in a system collapse. -
advertivo28 September 2022If you liked those epic long one shot's scenes brought to you by the combo Alfonso Cuarón + Emmanuel Lubezky, you will love this series. You also can notice their influence on the authors of L'Effondrement, because the plot of the movie also brings a postapocalyptical theme.
Don´t look up is another recent comparison regarding the topics covered in one of the chapters of this series. Bringing some uncomfortable truth to the table and having to deal with people's indifference.
Technically astounding, i dont know yet how they filmed some parts of the scenes, but I understand that they put a lot of work into preparing them.
The acting is amazing. Every character is depicted in great detail, and you connect and empathize with each of them.
One of the best series of recent times, and they didn´t need eight seasons for achieving that. Just eight 20min chapters. -
edfie_f23 August 2020This TV serie gives us a reason to think. Really topical to talkabout nowadays when a global pandemic got to wipe out stocks of roll paper around the world. Still isolated at home I think we can easily identify us with the characters from the first episode. A second episode brings us the crazy world we live in when a family that runs a gas station have some troubles to supply everyone with oil (and here is an acid reflex spoof about police) and they try to coax the owner. Sincerely the best episode in the entire series is the one who follows a government highup ending in a personal crisis. The fourth episode follows a desperate family who needs a shelter to live in. At the end the mother take a wrong decision which consists in betray the people of the council. Being of them brutally killed in the food pantry. The next episode didn't feel so close. A group of Electric Power Plant are being evacuated. But the next episode far exceed the best shooting from underwater and
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karlosslaj8 August 2021L'Effondrement is about collapse of the civilization. It isn't crystal clear what caused the collapse. There might be a few hints, but basically all supply chains fall apart and with them, everything.
What I love about this mini-series is that we might experience something exactly like this*. The show catches panic, desperation and denial very well.
Each episode is dedicated to a different person or a group that experiences collapse in a different way. Some of them end relatively well. Some are a tragedy. A few go sideways...
*except Ep. 05, there are safety systems designed for situations. -
The highlight of this mini series is its realization. Each chapter is shot with a handheld camera and in a single continuous take without editing, which makes it a novel product and very difficult to film. Another feature of the series is that the last episode could be considered the first, since the final chapter tells the origin of how the collapse of the world began. Each episode is independent of the other and tells stories of ordinary people in an environment in which the planet has collapsed and there is a lack of food, energy services are scarce or failing and people try by all means to find a way to survive, as they As the episodes go by, there is a progressive count of the days that have passed since this collapse, so as the stories progress they are increasingly crude and violent. We can see how people are desperate to get food that is missing in a market, fuel to escape to a safer place or simply people with a lot of money who have hired special services that will take them to special bunkers so that they are safe. A very entertaining, innovative series, very well directed and acted, and with a message that will leave more than one viewer thinking about the real possibility that the day of the collapse can come true.
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vasilisvas-6651822 January 2023The episodes of this tv series talk about the collapse of the system. Money worth nothing and people fight for gas and food trying to survive. So far so good!
The "problem" is that everything is extremely predictable. What do you expect that will happen if the system collapses? People in panic , killing each other for food and gas, right? Well , exactly that is happening. There is no originality. Nothing in the story that justifies making a tv show. They have nothing new to say , they just repeat things we have already seen in all post apocalyptic shows and films.
But is that necessarily bad? I am not sure. There is a documanteristic feel in the episodes that make you think that you are watching the news and not a tv show and the fact that nothing unpredictable happens makes that feel even more intense. You feel like these are real people, out there fighting for their lives! You feel like it's something that is happening now. For that feel alone it's a show worth watching. It's a show that tries to be real in an era when every show tries to be as fake as possible. That is its originality. That is its justification! -
It's one of the best few series I've seen in recent years (and I've seen a lot). It is fast-paced like an American action show, but without the unnecessary explosions and time-filling talking and subplots, and it also has that European cinema feeling of making films on a tight budget which means they have to deliver through ideas and moral dilemmas. It is action stripped to the bone but it tells a scary cautionary tale, ironically, in the year before the COVID pandemic that almost brought society to the Collapse the title of this amazing series talks about. Also the ending is hard-hitting and, like all the rest of these short but tense episodes with almost no connection between them, brilliantly thought.
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dsaywers-771716 January 2024From the first episode, the show captures the desperation of average people living in the hyper capitalistic world. People just want to continue to live their normal lives, but our normal lives have created a feedback cycle that will end in our self-destruction. There is no escape, and the unsettling feeling in the first episode carries through later heart wrenching stories of survival, desperation, and interspersed pockets of hope.
Highly recommend this show to anyone who has this feeling that modern society cannot continue down as we know it and to see what happens if we do. Just be prepared to be a bit uncomfortable, because the show feels real, and makes you question if you are doing enough to help prevent this type of situation from coming to fruition.
I loved the single take approach, it keeps the show personal further reinforces the hyper realism of the show. The single takes also feel more impactful as each episode reaches its conclusion.
Give it a try, if you can't find a place to stream it, google the name of the show in the subreddit collapse on reddit. That's where I found the subtitled episodes. -
laduqesa25 October 2022Ranging from episodes of fifteen minutes to twenty seven minutes this eight-parter told tales of disparate people and groups tenuously linked in some of the episodes.
The end was no longer nigh, it had happened. Capitalist society had broken down and the programmes explored various characters' reactions to survive the cataclysm.
Few of the episodes engaged me. However both the storyline and the acting in the episode set in the old folks home were a definite winner. I found the final episode the weakest of all as I could not believe either in the subversives nor in their acceptance by the television debate programme.
I also found the garage episode far fetched. A baseball bat would never have kept the ravening hordes away nor could it have stopped them sacking the place.
All in all an easy watch to fill in some time.