Don’t rain on my parade
In the short film Acide, Sofian Khammes and Maud Wyler aimed to shield their son while running from a devastating acid rain. The 18-minute format proved ideal for staging a desperate, inherently frenetic pursuit. When it’s the weather itself turning against us, survival is measured in mere minutes, sprinting across open fields to seek shelter that may not come. The scenario is tinged with an irony as well: for once, contemporary Western populations are forced into exile.
The challenge of turning this into a feature was therefore considerable, a bravura move that drew its power precisely from concision. Just Philippot and his co-screenwriter Yacine Badday sensibly opt for a road movie that accelerates in fits with the deadly downpours. The tricky part is balancing the apocalypse’s rain with real characters rather than silhouettes in motion; this time the family unit from the short—the parents Michal (Guillaume Canet) and Elise (Laetitia Dosch)—is fractured, which only intensifies the strain on their relationship with their daughter Selma (Patience Munchenbach).
A fairly traditional premise, and one that remains fitting here, since the director clearly sought from the outset to tell the escape of a family among many, ordinary people who won’t save the world (in the northeast of France) but will fight to survive the devastation at hand. After all, the first victims of climate upheaval aren’t the ones who accelerate it the most…
The family dynamic lands with greater impact because the writers don’t hesitate to push its foundations to the edge, more uncompromising than some American survival thrillers that inspired them at times. Inevitably, the very nature of the concept, plus borrowings from genre history (notably the second-to-last leg of the journey) bring about some tempo dips or narratively wandering detours. These exceptions tend to surface mainly between the major horror sequences, which remain surprisingly potent.
Here comes the rain again
La Nuée, while previously defended in our pages, was one of those fantasy films that uses the supernatural as a reveal, even as a somewhat clumsy metaphor for a social situation. Acide is likely to win over horror fans to a greater extent. Of course, it amplifies the politically charged question of the ongoing climate catastrophe by unleashing upon struggling French citizens the first plague of France. Yet, acid rain is less an allegory than a brutal blade, signaling the inexorable end we fear, even for Westerners who believed they were spared up to now.
Dark as it gets: there is no longer any alarm to press, but a full-blown meltdown of humanity and a chase that becomes absurd and nihilistic, tipping directly into outright terror. The fantastical isn’t merely a symbolic device anymore; it’s the manifestation of a visceral, chilling threat. A form of radicalism that might feel a touch vainglorious if the writing duo hadn’t truly subjected their characters to hell. Some grisly visions (two in particular), aided by formidable make-up effects and a direction flirting with sadism, are genuinely memorable.
Set against a desaturated, decaying visual palette, the film drew many comparisons to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Yet it more closely aligns with a current wave of international productions that treat climate change not as a social issue, but as an inevitable catastrophe. It’s essentially a localized Don’t Look Up horror, one that acknowledges the social context without ever sneering at the poor souls it puts through the wringer.
The victims aren’t scapegoated; they are already grappling with a France far from pacified. Guillaume Canet plays a rough-hewn former union organizer who paid dearly for his misadventures. Perhaps the film’s most chilling detail is the convergence of multiple sources of violence, driving France—and the world—toward a wall, turning people into crimson, melted cheese as corrosive drips erode their defenses. The outcome is clear, yet nihilistic enough to resonate with our rising eco-anxiety.
