After years of special-effects heavy, testosterone-infused, end-of-the-world dramas, your Roland Emmerichs and your Michael Bays, lately there’ve been a lot of apocalyptic comedies. Still though, not much has changed. These comedies take place on the larger scale, with big effects and big death tolls and more disconcerting, a lack of prominent or believable female characters. This Is the End was a bro-fest, The World’s End ’s lone female was a love interest, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World delivered another Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the list.
It’s a Disaster is a quiet, low-budget comedy about four couples, friends gathered for a monthly brunch, who become trapped in a house together when they hear that a terrorist attack nearby has spread deadly nerve gas in the air and they will all soon experience excruciating deaths. But the movie isn’t even really about the end of the world. It’s an extended character study wearing the clothes of an apocalypse story. It’s a story about commitment and friendship and love, and how they’re all tested when disaster strikes and all lines of communication are down.
The spectacle of the disaster takes place off-screen, we hear snippets over the radio and from the few people from outside who interact with the people in the house. Instead, the movie examines human nature and the disaster is just a catalyst that opens up the characters and strips away all pretense of civility. It’s the cheapest end-of-the-world movie, but it’s probably the most realistic; the characters, as narcissistic and bourgeois as they are, having their private brunches and mourning over watching The Wire, resemble people we all know, at least in the broad strokes.
Of the eight main characters, the cast’s four women are interesting and dynamic. They aren’t love interests, but equal protagonists, who get to tell their own stories and suffer their own break-downs. Emma and Peter Mandrake (Erinn Hayes and Blaise Miller), control-freaks with a seemingly perfect marriage who hide their plans for a divorce, are hosting the brunch. Their guests include Buck and Lexi (Rachel Boston and Kevin M. Brennan), a pair of free spirits with an open marriage and Shane and Hedy (Jeff Grace and America Ferrera), a conspiracy theorist and high school chemistry teacher who’ve been engaged forever with no wedding in sight. Completing their friend group is Julia Stiles’s Tracey, a neurotic doctor who complains that she’s always dating guys who turn out to be crazy.
As it always is in movies with large groups of friends, the viewer is forced to suspend disbelief to buy that all these people are close friends. Though the characters are all stereotypical, the ways they behave and react to each other and the apocalypse ring true. These are close friends kept together by their rituals; the monthly brunches that everyone feels obligated to attend hang like a millstone around their necks, but no matter how much they dread brunch, none of them feels comfortable ending a tradition. Especially as it means admitting they’re no longer as close as they were. With the news of the disaster, along with the hidden resentments, lusts and rages that come to the foreground, so does the news that many of them don’t actually like each other. For instance, Peter tells Tracey that after his divorce, he doesn’t want her to contact him any more as he can’t see them being friends.
Our initial vantage point on the group is that of an outsider. Tracey’s new boyfriend Glen (David Cross) is meeting her friends for the first time. In a foreboding twist, Tracey is more anxious about introducing Glen to her friends than he is about meeting them. This is only their third date and poor Glen is completely alienated by her friends and caught in the middle when the chaos begins. The awkwardness is made worse by the intense gender segregation of the gathering, where men convene in one room to watch sports, while the women gossip in another.
It’s easy to see It’s a Disaster as two different films, split by the characters’ awareness of the attack. If you started watching it without reading any synopses, you might not know it’s an apocalypse movie until the Mandrakes’ neighbor, Hal (writer-director Todd Berger) comes by wearing a Hazmat suit and informs them.
If you were going to judge the movie on just its first part, it’d be a cliche, just whining hipsters complaining about their relationships, but the film’s second half causes the viewer to look back and reassess, noticing how the characters try to hide their problems and pretend everything is fine.
There’s also the foreshadowing. They lose cellular signals, the cable and internet go out, and sirens recur in the background. Originally none of these things appear abnormal; the sirens seem like ordinary background noise, there could be issues with weather and then Emma and Peter fall into a tense fight, each believing the other didn’t pay the bills because of their divorce. All that comes before the reveal is imbued with a sense of impending doom as most viewers are aware going in of what the movie is about. Part of the fun of the movie is watching each small detail grow into a larger conflict which builds into convincing character development.
Though we begin the movie posed from Glen’s point of view, as the film progresses, it moves from Glen’s perspective to a more general, fly on the wall view of the action. Because the shift doesn’t happen exactly at the point of the reveal, viewers go seamlessly from outsiders entering a place we don’t understand and being forced to participate, to watching action we are not involved in.
Like the characters, there’s very little we know about the actual disaster. Insulted that he wasn’t invited to their brunch, Hal informs them that bombs have gone off downtown and they have to remain inside, before leaving them to their own devices. For a great deal of the film, the characters aren’t sure if the reports they’ve heard are real or how bad things are outside, so it isn’t until the very end that they start to think of concrete plans. The movie isn’t about how they’re going to survive the disaster (eventually they just decide they’re all going to die); instead, it’s about how they slowly learn to deal with each other and air their long-suppressed grievances.
For Emma and Peter, the disaster brings back them together, allowing them time to relax and listen to music in the car, reconnecting in a context far from their everyday problems. Lexi and Burt play around on an acoustic guitar, wear bedsheet togas and eventually realize they don’t have much that bonds them together; that in all their experimenting they were only trying to find something novel to share. Hedy, whose chemistry knowledge makes her hyperaware of what’s going to happen to them, stops caring about anything. She breaks up with Shane and then spends the day drinking and mixing chemicals to make ecstasy, feeling that they can at least go out having fun. Later, when a suicide plot is considered, Hedy’s extensive knowledge of all the symptoms they will run through before they die, is what convinces them that it’s the best option.
Throughout the afternoon, the group had mentioned another couple who were supposed to attend the brunch, but who always show up late. Near the end of the movie, these friends arrive, clearly suffering from the effects of the toxin and everyone inside the house refuses to let them in. Tracey in particular, shuts them out, and even as they die on the porch and are eaten by crows, maintains that they deserved it for being late. Their inhibitions have been so loosened by the disaster that rules of order and civility have completely broken down. Things that were mere annoyances, like their friends’ habitual lateness take on outsized importance when the stakes are raised.
Meanwhile, Tracey and Glen bond fast and appear to have a real love connection, the conventional romantic comedy relationship set against a disaster. However, in the eleventh hour, Glen proves himself to be a religious fanatic and anti-Semite, when he serves everyone wine laced with rat poison. He believes they should all die together before the rapture begins and though the others don’t agree with his beliefs, they consider drinking the wine to spare themselves a painful death.
It’s an interesting, albeit abrupt, twist as Glen originally appeared to be the most logical one in the group. However, it does seem like a bit of a betrayal when the character whose perspective we were aligned with at the start turns out to be crazy and is suddenly shut out of the group as an outsider. Glen’s status as a “religious nut job” is the glue that binds the friends back together, allowing them to bond over laughing at him. It is also a form of redemption for Tracey as she explained earlier that her friends never believed her when she told their that her other boyfriends were crazy.
In the end, everyone has their own belief systems–among them science, superheroes, and the wisdom of crowds and they hesitate to drink the poisoned wine. They’re afraid of being wrong, of killing themselves a minute before help arrives. The film abruptly ends (recalling an earlier conversation between Tracey and Glen) with everyone poised to drink. Whether you believe they do or not depends on your opinion of each character and who they would be in real life.
The ending shows that no matter how much they try to change, the tightly wound taking a risk and dancing around in togas, the free spirits trying to think in concrete, logical terms, they’re all going to continue to be the same types of people until they die.
Though I had many good things to say about the movie, there are also some criticisms that shouldn’t be ignored. It’s great that the movie focused equally on female and male characters, but as in most films, women’s characters are explored only insofar as they are as parts of couples. I have to wonder if screenwriters can conceive of a woman in a context outside of a romantic relationship. In addition, starting the film from a male character’s POV, even though he doesn’t end up playing a more significant role than anyone else, sets him up as a default protagonist.
Though this may be an attempt at satire, the characters refer multiple times to the destruction of multiple American cities as the end of the world. As they speak to a call centre worker overseas who is not experiencing anything out of the ordinary, it’s clear that only the US is affected and the characters’ occasionally self-centered view extends to their conception of the world.
It’s a Disaster is a unique twist on the disaster movie. The point of the movie isn’t the apocalypse, but the character’s relationships. Whether or not they’re going to survive isn’t the point either. It’s a disaster movie that isn’t a disaster epic, instead it’s a captivating and often hilarious comedy of manners.
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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.
Who wrote this? Why isn’t that mentioned? This is a brilliant story and I want to know who came up with it.
Also, I keep thinking, “Lord of the Flies.”