Michala Brasseur
Seven teenagers. Five months. Twenty feet underground. No exit.Survival Box tells the gripping story of a handful of high school kids trapped in a wealthy Philadelphia family's backyard bunker.As the film opens, a graduation party rages in the fallout shelter up the hill from the family mansion. Once an imagined safe haven from terrorist attacks, this fortified bunker now provides the perfect place to smoke up, hook up, and hang out. But when the blast doors unexpectedly slam shut, and when the outside world goes dead silent for days on end, blind panic sets in. Six teenagers must suddenly put down their beer cans and wrestle with life and death decisions.Claustrophobia and confusion rule the first few days, but hope for rescue seems strong, and spirits stay high; there's food and water, and the optimism of the privileged world remains intact. As evidence points toward nuclear catastrophe, though, the tight-knit group fractures, and when one of the girls reveals that she's pregnant, the future begins to darken.With tight ensemble acting and infused with the humor and rebelliousness of adolescence, Survival Box mixes the character-driven teen angst of The Breakfast Club and Stand By Me with the intensity and drama of The Virgin Suicides and Dead Poets Society... all told with a thrilling claustrophobic drive reminiscent of films like Misery and Panic Room.This gritty and ominous adolescent thriller, where young people must fight tooth and nail for survival, will elicit apt comparisons to the Hunger Games, but in its society-building and hope for the human condition, Survival Box is also a cerebral Lord of the Flies for the nuclear age.