Memoirs of a Survivor 2001 Horror Movie Review

My impression of this movie is that it seems to have been a six-hour mini-series that was cut down to 116 minutes, and not too successfully.  The only plausible reason I can see for its utterly confusing and disjointed scenes would be that they were trying to create the uncertainty one would feel in a society recently disrupted by some cataclysmic event.  If there is any sort of plot, it is the attempt of a young man to try to care for the orphaned children.  He wants Emily to help him in this endeavor; however, it seems that every time they get together they engage in sex, even when the little kids are in the room with them!  Then, they sort of break up when the guy wants to take in some feral children, or at least children who live like they were brought up by some wild animal. 


What the Victorian scenes have to do with the story is anybody’s guess.  Some would suggest that it is some sort of fantasy Julie Christie is having.  Whatever the purpose of the Victorian scenes, twice they resort to nakedness.  Once is with a decidedly unsexy middle age, heavy woman stripping completely naked.  The second is when four-year-old Emily is sleeping, and her night gown has risen up; she turns over on her back, fully exposed from mid-chest down, and some man, presumably her father, covers her up.  If they needed to show fully naked children, it would seem to me to have been much more understandable to have a group bath of the filthy urchins that joined the children’s group.  Little Emily coming uncovered, and being tucked in by a loving parent isn’t anything any parent of a preschool daughter hasn’t had naturally happen; it is that it just didn’t seem to have anything to do with the catastrophe of the movie.


My conclusion is that this movie is too disjointed and erratic to be of much use in raising any personal or social issues that could be discussed.  After watching the movie one is much more likely to be asking what was that all about instead of discussing or thinking about some edifying issue it raises.