“ Survive,” directed by Mark Pellington, fully ignores the body for the mind. It shows two people, Jane and Paul, the only two people who make it out alive after an aeroplane crash but are stranded on a mountain top. Jane suffers from anxiety and is visited by her history, which makes her want to kill herself. Paul, on the other hand, is a mentally strong person who's in no way giving up despite the odds. In exploring these psyches, especially Jane’s, the film disregards the sheer brutal verification that they are, after all, two humans lost in the mountains without important food or water. They miraculously survive for days, walking through heavy snow, snowfall, and rocky terrain, and are too injured to continue.
The film nearly ignores reality to claw into the internal state of Jane and her perception of reality. And Paul is nothing but a device used to make Jane’s metamorphosis lucid to the observers. But too important of anything is bad, and that's what happens then. So, if you can designedly overlook the surface to make way for the interior, you can watch this film. Else, you'll find yourself questioning how crazy the film is. The film’s struggle to be true to its kidney as adventure suspense is nothing further than satisfactory. And it's therefore the double-agent nature of the film that leads to its downfall.
Jane And Her Relationship With Pain
Jane lives in LifeHouse, a home for individuals who suffer from different kinds of internal diseases. Jane hasPost-Traumatic Stress Complaint with Suicidal Creativity. It has been a time since she tried to kill herself by incising her wrist, a commodity that landed her in this place. She says that she didn’t want to be taken nearly differently or down; she wanted to be saved, ached and loved. Latterly on, we find out that she's angry at her father for killing himself, but at the same time blames herself too. This seems to be her way of logic with herself about the death of her father. She doesn’t know why her father killed himself, but she uses the pain that she feels from his absence against herself. As she latterly reveals during commerce, she's also a diary, and she loses her mind if she's unfit to know what to anticipate coming. Maybe this is the reason why she turned on herself after her father’s death, a commodity that wasn’t a part of her plan. And this feeling of tone- the hurt is a commodity she has been carrying inside her all her life. It's just as Paul says during a point in the movie that one bad memory weighs in so important that a thousand good recollections feel to drift down. The death of Jane’s father took such a risk on her life that it fully relieve her of anything that made her smile. And it took an aeroplane crash for Jane to come face-to-face with reality (a commodity which the film couldn’t do).
Likewise, Jane indeed leaves her roommate, youthful Cara, who's back at Life House, without indeed telling her. And when she receives a call from her croaker, who has planted out from Cara that she intends to do commodity hurtful to herself, Jane turns it around and tells him that Cara is an obsessive fabricator. She does this only so that she can go back home. We don't know if she had this reason ready or if she made it up also and there. But either way, it does, in a way, signify her planning nature. Still, this is the only time we get to see her planning side, as the film doesn’t explore it presently.
At the field, she meets Paul, who seems to be a unanimous joe. They indeed have their seats beside each other (Paul reveals latterly that he changed his seat to sit beside her). And while Paul likes to talk, Jane isn’t interested in each, so she apologizes and keeps to herself. She decides to put an end to her life by using an overdose of her capsules. But before doing that, she writes a note to Paul, telling him that he needs to know that her death wasn’t his fault and that she's glad that he was the last person she spoke to. She folds the piece of paper and puts it inside Paul’s fund while he sleeps. She also goes inside the restroom and is meaning when fate shows up as if to educate her on an assignment about the life that she wanted to end so poorly. Her letter to Paul proves that she has a good heart that has been taken over by her mind, which is the case utmost of the time for us too. We tend to push down those who watch for us and stay alone and try to absorb the pain by putting a lid on it, which only tightens the pain’s grasp around us. Or, it can also be a way for Jane to keep Paul out of her life and her pain, which she knows will only hurt him.
After the aeroplane crash, she finds a piece of glass that she keeps to herself, another sign of her intention to kill herself. And now she has further reason to do so since there's no way to survive. Still, let’s remember that after Paul left her alone inside the crashed aeroplane, she followed him. This shows that she doesn’t want to die like that, which is evidence of the connection between two of her major aspects, i.e., her planning nature and her suicidal nature. Self-murder is planned death, and it includes opinions as well. But since all that's passing around Jane isn’t according to her plans or opinions, she isn’t willing to die moreover. In simple words, she can kill herself, not an arbitrary aeroplane crash, an avalanche, or indeed a wolf. Interestingly, she uses the veritable piece of glass to kill the wolf that she intended to use to kill herself ( presumably by incising her wrist yet again). This piece of glass is a symbol of her transition from her former insecure tone to one who has taken control over her conduct.
Paul’s Confidence Isn’t Enough
Throughout the film, it's an injured Paul that keeps stopgap warm amidst the deep freeze. This is done to the extent that when he's on the verge of giving up, it's Jane who motivates him and tells him that they will make it out alive. This change in Jane is brought about by Paul.
We should mention the part of nature in bringing Paul and Jane near, which strengthened both their bond and will to survive. Still, it doesn’t change reality. Paul is fatally wounded. He broke his caricatures in the crash, and the infection spread to his whole torso. But he goes on because he knows that if he breaks down, Jane will too, and he can't let that be. Other than the fact that he was smitten, he presumably tasted that Jane had some kind of issue, from their discussion on the aeroplane and also latterly on when she denied leaving the crash point, and he'd not leave her alone in her state.
Still, his confident tone, as raised by his mama, the commodity he speaks to Jane about while they're inside a delve, begins to deteriorate when reality strikes. One can be as stalwart as one wants, but nature doesn’t understand frippery, and neither does it forgive. And indeed though they get out of the delve, adversity doesn’t end there. Paul breaks his left arm, and his body weakens further to the point where he starts puking blood. This is when Paul realizes that he's going to die. Still, he makes Jane understand that she has to stay alive.
‘ Survive’ Ending Explained-Does Jane Make It? Is Paul Alive?
Jane walks a long way, surviving the deep freeze, facing a wolf, killing it, and entering deep injuries in the process, eventually reaching a road. But before she could take the road, she fell unconscious. After she wakes up in a sanitarium in Montana, she finds out from her mama that the authorities plant Paul the morning after they plant her. Paul is dead. He left a note for her wherein he mentioned how glad he was that they plant each other. And it was this note that would be Jane’s stepping gravestone into a new phase of her life, one that wasn’t dark but bright. She had survived not just death but herself and was revived. And although she doesn’t have Paul with her, her love for him and his love for her will always be there in her heart.
While “ Survive” shows Jane’s trip of getting a better interpretation of herself by taking her through nature’s adversities, the process feels vague. And let us not ignore the fact that everything that Jane and Paul went through was supposedly on an empty stomach and without water. They climbed down a steep mountain without any kind of harness. And although it's tough to accept all this, the communication of the film makes us overlook it all the same. But this is our nobility and not all of the film’s environment.