All Fall Down – Struggling to Survive: Before the Dawn of the Apes (Year 5)
2014 · 5m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Daniel Thron
Tones: dark, melancholic
Five years after the pandemic outbreak, human society continues to dissolve. Survivors struggle to endure in the world left before the dawn of the apes.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The audacity of burying a Planet of the Apes reference in the title of a micro-budget pandemic survival film is exactly the kind of unhinged premise-shuffling that makes most scouts nervous—which is precisely why it's brilliant. Thron's doing something genuinely perverse here: refusing to let the pandemic narrative be itself, forcing us to live in the uncanny space between two apocalypses.
While the formal rigor of sustaining five minutes of post-pandemic atmosphere is commendable, the film remains somewhat tethered to well-worn survival drama beats without the compositional clarity or editorial precision one expects from work engaging this lineage—think Bong Joon-ho's minimalist dystopias or the structured decay of climate fiction.
The choice to bury apocalypse under apocalypse—layering the apes mythology onto the pandemic narrative—forces the camera and sound design to work twice as hard to justify why we're watching this specific story, and that tension is where Thron extracts everything from a five-minute runtime that a bigger film might waste.