INTRODUCTION: APOCALYPSE MEOW
Post-apocalyptic movies are supposed to be thrilling, raw, and full of tension. The Day (2011) is none of these things. Directed by Douglas Aarniokoski — a man whose name sounds cooler than anything that happens in his movie — this Canadian “horror-action-drama” tries to combine The Road, Mad Max, and The Walking Dead into one grimy, gunmetal gray slog. Unfortunately, what we get instead is 85 minutes of people standing around a farmhouse arguing about canned food.
This is the kind of movie where everything is blue-gray, everyone is filthy, and nobody seems to own a flashlight. It’s not The Day so much as Fifty Shades of Beige.
It stars Ashley Bell (who looks like she’s perpetually one sigh away from quitting), Shannyn Sossamon (doing her best “emotionally distant but cool haircut” impression), Shawn Ashmore (a.k.a. “the X-Men guy not named Hugh”), Dominic Monaghan (Merry from Lord of the Rings wondering where his agent went wrong), and Cory Hardrict (probably still wondering why he agreed to die first).
The movie grossed $20,984 at the box office. Yes, you read that right. That’s not even enough to cover the catering.
THE PLOT: NOTHING HAPPENS, AND THEN EVERYONE DIES
In the not-so-distant future — or maybe the grungiest present imaginable — civilization has collapsed. Why? Who knows. The script sure doesn’t. There are cannibals roaming around, the world looks like a dust filter vomited on it, and everyone’s got a bad case of moral fatigue.
Our merry band of survivors — Adam (Shawn Ashmore), Rick (Dominic Monaghan), Shannon (Shannyn Sossamon), Henson (Cory Hardrict), and Mary (Ashley Bell) — wander the wasteland in search of food, shelter, and apparently better dialogue.
They’ve got two jars of seeds that are supposed to symbolize “hope” or something, but mostly they just sit on a shelf while the group argues about whether to settle down or keep running. It’s like Gilligan’s Island if everyone was constantly hangry and covered in soot.
Eventually, they stumble upon an abandoned farmhouse, because of course they do. And because this is a horror movie, they decide to stay there — ignoring every survival instinct known to man. Inside, they find tinned food (score!)… except it’s filled with rocks (boo!). Also, there’s a booby trap that kills one of them, because apparently the local cannibals are both murderous and great at Home Alone-style engineering.
The rest of the film plays out like a very depressing siege episode of Little House on the Prairie. Cannibals show up, the survivors shoot at them, and everyone yells a lot about trust, guilt, and “what it means to be human.” You know, the usual stuff you talk about when you’re eating beans in the apocalypse.
THE CHARACTERS: FIVE FLAVORS OF MISERY
Let’s break down our cast of walking personality voids:
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Mary (Ashley Bell): She’s tough, haunted, and occasionally stabs people. That’s… pretty much it. She’s got a mysterious past involving cannibalism, which should make her interesting, but the movie treats it like she forgot to return a library book.
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Adam (Shawn Ashmore): The resident sad dad archetype. We get flashbacks of his dead family, because heaven forbid a post-apocalyptic movie skip the tragic backstory. He spends most of his time scowling and eventually dies heroically. Probably. It’s hard to tell through the gray filter.
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Shannon (Shannyn Sossamon): She’s cynical, competent, and perpetually annoyed — the audience’s spirit animal.
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Rick (Dominic Monaghan): The nominal leader, who dies halfway through because someone had to trigger the basement trap scene. He deserved better — and by “better,” I mean any other movie.
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Henson (Cory Hardrict): He’s sick, possibly dying, and definitely underwritten. You know the movie’s struggling when your “tragic infection subplot” barely registers.
Every actor seems to have been directed to deliver their lines as if they’re auditioning for a Calvin Klein fragrance called Despair. The dialogue is peppered with deep, ponderous lines like:
“We can’t keep running forever.”
“We already are dead.”
“Hope… it’s just another word for pain.”
Thanks, I hate it.
THE CANNIBALS: NOW WITH EXTRA GENERIC
The villains of The Day are cannibals — a choice that’s about as original as zombie outbreaks or evil stepmothers. They grunt, snarl, and occasionally wear leather. One even has a daughter, because apparently even flesh-eaters need a family dynamic.
They’re led by Michael Eklund, who chews scenery the way his character chews people. Unfortunately, the script gives him nothing to do except bark orders and glare menacingly. He’s less terrifying than mildly inconvenienced — like a man who got the wrong order at Starbucks but is too polite to complain.
By the time the final siege arrives, you’ll be rooting for the cannibals — not because they’re scary, but because at least they’re doing something.
THE STYLE: GRAY FILTERS AND GRAINY SUFFERING
Visually, The Day looks like someone filmed it through an old sock. The color grading is so aggressively washed-out that it makes The Road look like La La Land. Everything is a different shade of mud — brown mud, gray mud, slightly wetter mud.
You can tell the filmmakers wanted to evoke realism and despair, but they overshot and landed squarely in “accidental black-and-white student film” territory. The cinematography screams, “Look how gritty this is!” while the plot whispers, “Nothing’s happening.”
The action scenes — when they finally occur — are shot so close and edited so frantically that you could be watching a blender commercial. At one point, I wasn’t sure if a character got stabbed or just dropped their lunch.
Even the sound design is exhausting. There’s constant ambient wind, as if the apocalypse came with its own broken air conditioner.
THE THEMES: “WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?” (NOTHING.)
The Day desperately wants to say something profound about survival, morality, and human nature. It doesn’t. It just repeats the same tired existential beats we’ve heard in a hundred other end-of-the-world movies.
There are seeds that symbolize hope, but they’re never planted. There are moral dilemmas, but none of them matter. There’s a subplot about Mary’s past as a cannibal, which could’ve been fascinating — except it’s resolved faster than a microwaved burrito.
By the end, all the movie’s pseudo-philosophical musings collapse under the weight of their own self-importance. It’s like being lectured about Nietzsche by someone who’s only read his Wikipedia page.
THE ENDING: GRAY, GRIM, AND POINTLESS
After endless gunfire, screaming, and angst, everyone either dies or limps away dramatically. Mary ends up alone, walking away from a burning house, having killed a cannibal child (or maybe not — it’s unclear and you won’t care). The final shot tries for poetic ambiguity but lands closer to “low-budget Marlboro ad.”
The movie fades to black, presumably out of mercy.
FINAL VERDICT: THE LONGEST DAY EVER
The Day is the cinematic equivalent of being trapped in a waiting room during the apocalypse. It’s dull, joyless, and convinced it’s saying something important about the human condition when it’s really just saying, “We ran out of lighting gel.”
It’s not scary. It’s not thrilling. It’s not even particularly bad in an entertaining way. It just exists, like an abandoned can of beans on a dusty shelf.
If you want post-apocalyptic tension, watch The Road. If you want action, watch Mad Max: Fury Road. If you want to stare at muted gray landscapes while slowly losing the will to live, congratulations — The Day is your masterpiece.
Rating: 1 out of 5 Empty Cans.
Because the only thing more lifeless than this world is the screenplay. 🌫️🔫🍽️
