Home invasion thrillers form a subgenre that, like zombie movies, won’t ever go out of fashion, and the latest addition to them is Survive the Night, which has just had a bloody and intense clip released.
The bulk of the film takes place in the remote and isolated house of Rich, a trauma doctor being sued for malpractice and considering settling without a fight, whose home is invaded by a pair of murderer and armed robber brothers named Jamie and Mathias, the latter of whom has been mortally wounded in a gas station shoot out caused by the former’s psychopathy. To repel the invaders, Rich must team up with his estranged father Frank, a retired sheriff, in the hope of surviving the incursion.
The clip in question, which is viewable above, shows an intense moment early in the ordeal (and flashed forward to in the movie’s opening moments), where the reason for the criminals’ choice of house is made clear: Rich must perform emergency (and presumably incredibly unhygienic) surgery on Mathias to remove a bullet lodged in his body and causing him to bleed out, in order to save the lives of his wife and daughter, who are being held hostage and will be killed should the criminal die.
It’s not much to presume that even if everything they demand is acquiesced to, the brothers don’t intend to let the family live after their ordeal, and so a fight back against the invaders will be required if they want to make it to dawn alive, hence the movie’s title, likely leading to a series of shifting power plays where the lives of the people cared about on both sides will be put in jeopardy.
Survive the Night does contain a lot of standard fare, but its promise to not shy away from blood and violence sets it apart from the PG-13 variants on similar premises, and this clip certainly illustrates what can be expected from it.