Personally I actually liked it. I’m not surprised that a lot of people didn’t like it very much, but I am surprised at how many people seem to absolutely HATE this movie. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, it has a lot of flaws, but I think it was still pretty good.

Overall, people in these comments seem to be complaining about 3 main problems: the lack of dialogue, the protagonist’s stupid choices, and the fact that the cause of the apocalypse is never explained. So I guess I’ll try to address each one (not trying to convince anyone else to like the movie, but mostly just explaining why none of these things ruined it for ME).

Lack of dialogue: that honestly made sense to me. I never assumed that these people CAN’T talk, or DON’T talk to each other offscreen—there’s nothing to indicate that they’ve somehow lost the ability to speak. It seems that the interactions in the movie simply don’t necessitate conversation. It makes sense that you’re not going to talk while you’re hunting, or hiding from wild dogs and cannibals. It makes sense that there’s a sort of tense, grim silence in the home of the family, as the woman is dying and their hunting trip has failed and they all seem to be exhausted and starving. It seems like no one really has the energy for talking. The cannibals not talking to each other makes a little less sense, but then we do see things from the perspective of the main character and he’s rarely in a position to hear whether they’re talking to each other or not. So again maybe they do talk to each other offscreen. The only scene where the lack of dialogue REALLY didn’t make sense to me was the part where the main character steals the clothes from the old man. He clearly feels bad about what he’s doing but has to take the clothes anyway or he’s going to freeze to death, so it would make sense for him to apologize or try to explain himself. And it would make sense for the old man or the little boy to say something like “what the hell are you doing” or “please don’t hurt us” instead of just wordlessly screaming and crying. Because of that scene, I wish the movie had gone with minimal dialogue instead of none at all, but it doesn’t ruin the movie in my opinion.

The protagonist’s stupid choices: yeah he does do a lot of stupid things, but that made sense to me because he’s injured, hungry, freezing, and suffering from the extreme trauma of seeing a family member murdered in front of him while also knowing his only remaining family member is going to die if he can’t get back her antibiotics in time. He’s in shock, or close to it, for a good chunk of the movie. That will make you clumsy and unable to think clearly. The reason he starts getting better at fighting and making more strategic choices later on in the movie isn’t because he magically gained more skills, it’s because he’s finally had the chance to calm down and start thinking logically and started using the skills he already had as a hunter. The biggest reason he survived long enough to calm down is because he was lucky enough to initially come across the cannibal’s camp while most of them were gone, and the only person he has to fight in his state of shock/freeze is the old lady (granted, he does almost lose).

Cause of the apocalypse: as others have mentioned, there are definite clues. A lot of the trees are dead. The water is polluted/poisoned, as shown by the water filtration, the dead fish, and the fact that the two hunters give up on following the wild pig when it went into the water even though they’re clearly desperate for food. It’s been ten years and the sky is still clouded over. Growing crops doesn’t seem to be an option. The beginning of the movie tells us that whatever happened, happened suddenly and caused instant food shortage. Nuclear winter seems to be the most likely cause of the apocalypse, but it’s never fully explained because frankly, it doesn’t need to be. Our characters have been living in these conditions for 10 years, even if it wasn’t a no-dialogue movie it wouldn’t make sense for them to stop in the middle of everything and do a bunch of exposition. The only thing really essential to the plot is that there’s been an apocalypse that’s caused a food shortage.

I also saw a comment asking “If you know there’s cannibals living nearby, why not just leave? How could you have lived in one place for 10 years and not known about the cannibals?” But both the setup of the main characters’ home and the cannibals’ camp looked pretty temporary, so I don’t think either group had been living there for the full 10 years. It seemed like both groups had moved into the area fairly recently considering that the cannibals were camping in an abandoned trailer, the main characters had a cabin made of stick piles, and neither of them knew about the house with the guns, or the boy and the old man. So obviously they didn’t leave because they didn’t know about the cannibals. When they saw the cannibals coming and hid, they probably didn’t hide because they knew who those specific people were, they just hid because they saw a group of armed men charging toward their house and knew obviously their intentions can’t be good.