‘Survival Skills’ is a deeply unsettling, timely thriller about policing [#FantasiaFest2020]

A review of the new video thriller, at Fantasia Festival now

Throughout the Fantasia Film Festival, I’ll be covering as many films as I can watch before my eyeballs fall out of my head and my fingers drop off from typing too much!

Survival Skills will be showing online, on-demand throughout the Fantasia Film Festival, which kicks off on August 20th.

Sometimes a movie comes along at just the right time. When writer-director Quinn Armstrong created his new film Survival Skills, he would have had no way of knowing that it would be premiering amidst one of the biggest social movements in American history, as people around the world are waking up to the fact that modern policing is a fundamentally, irreparably broken institution. We’ve spent the last few months arguing about whether it’s possible to retrain officers to help eliminate bias, or if we just need to tear the system down and start over. Is the problem individual “bad apples,” or is the whole thing corrupt?

Survival Skills, a horror film in the guise of a resurfaced police training video from the 80s, suggests the latter. It argues that even the absolute idealized, model policeman will quickly be broken down by the…