There are many ways a film might examine some aspects of our society. Whether drama, comedy, horror, or science fiction, each genre provides a different lens to examine what and who we are. Satire is the most powerful of these lenses if used correctly. By taking some subject and twisting it to an extreme position, we can expose some of the absurdity of our world.

Survival Skills is one of those movies. Taking the form of a lost 1980s police training tape, it follows Jim (Vayu O’Donnell), a childlike rookie police officer going through his first day. Things take a turn, though, when the narrator (Stacy Keach) walks him through a domestic violence call, and he begins to disagree with the proper procedure.

All Jim wants to do, in his naïveté, is help. He wants to get the woman out of danger, but everything from his cynical partner to the overworked social programs stands in his way.

It would be easy to write Survival Skills off as a cheap nostalgia bid or a wacky experiment, and it would have been easy just to be that. Still, writer and director Quinn Armstrong’s script takes the story to some uncomfortably dark places and pits Jim’s desire to help against our society and all the ways it fails the people it tries to protect.

It’s a real feat that this film will make you feel sympathy for Jim while also watching the systems of modern policing turn him slowly into the same kind of complacent and cynical monster that we’ve been seeing on TV for the past several months.

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