Why are films that take us off the grid on the rise?

In Cap­tain Fan­tas­tic Vig­go Mortensen shows a dif­fer­ent side to his reper­toire as the leader of a fam­i­ly that lives a seem­ing­ly idyl­lic life ​“off the grid”. He teach­es his kids to fend for them­selves using basic hunt­ing and wildlife skills, while instill­ing a pal­pa­ble mis­trust of the out­side world in them. It’s a theme cin­e­ma has turned to repeat­ed­ly in recent years; rather than pre­sent­ing sim­ple tales of men and women ver­sus the ele­ments, these films touch on issues that speak to our every­day lives, or rather what’s lack­ing in them.

The tagline for 2013’s Tracks – ​‘Leave every­thing behind’ – encour­aged view­ers to buy into the spir­i­tu­al and lit­er­al jour­ney tak­en by Mia Wasikowska’s char­ac­ter. Based on the true sto­ry of Robyn David­son, the film sees her trek across 1700 miles of Aus­tralian desert, accom­pa­nied only by her dog and four camels, car­ry­ing only the bare essen­tials as she heads into the vast, large­ly unin­hab­it­ed land­scape. A sim­i­lar jour­ney was under­tak­en the fol­low­ing year in Wild, anoth­er true sto­ry fol­low­ing Reese Witherspoon’s trou­bled divorcee, who rec­on­ciles with her past and her future by explor­ing the Pacif­ic Crest Trail. While not exact­ly off the grid, films such as 127 Hours, Life of Pi and The Revenant have also riffed on the idea of get­ting back to basics, far away from the com­forts of civilisation.

There are sev­er­al fac­tors that make these films so appeal­ing to audi­ences today. The dig­i­tal age has afford­ed us unprece­dent­ed access to knowl­edge and made us more con­nect­ed, but it has also cre­at­ed a world where there are very few places to hide. Most peo­ple car­ry a device with geo-loca­tion tools and a hi-res­o­lu­tion cam­era every­where they go, and through social media we can tap into a glob­al net­work of hun­dreds of mil­lions of voic­es. This lev­el of con­nec­tiv­i­ty can be exhaust­ing, as evi­denced by a sto­ry from July of this year where a cou­ple who described them­selves as ​“off-grid par­ents” asked for £100,000 in dona­tions to live self-suf­fi­cient­ly in Cos­ta Rica (iron­i­cal­ly, this plea was made online). Oth­er less extreme inci­dents have led to the rise of dig­i­tal vaca­tions, where mobile devices are turned off and left behind in a bid to tem­porar­i­ly escape..

In a broad sense, films like Cap­tain Fan­tas­tic indulge that fan­ta­sy. Instead of wor­ry­ing about that pre­sen­ta­tion due in on Mon­day, or whether your train to work will be run­ning on time, you’re build­ing a shel­ter or start­ing a fire. Fur­ther­more, these films explore the notion that in order to bet­ter under­stand the mod­ern world we must occa­sion­al­ly remove our­selves from it. The emo­tion­al jour­ney expe­ri­enced by Reese Witherspoon’s griev­ing pro­tag­o­nist in Wild mir­rors her phys­i­cal one; James Franco’s acci­den­tal dis­con­nect from soci­ety in 127 Hours enables him to learn the true val­ue of human connection.

Behind all this wish ful­fil­ment and vic­ar­i­ous adven­tures, per­haps the most vital take­away from watch­ing these off-the-grid char­ac­ters is that real world can­not be avoid­ed. Cap­tain Fan­tas­tic starts off as an entic­ing vision of sim­pler life, but the draw of the out­side world even­tu­al­ly lures the chil­dren he has pro­tect­ed for so long. It’s a heart break­ing jour­ney, but an inevitable one that is always behind any tale of self-iso­la­tion: that no man (or in this case, fam­i­ly) is an island. The great­est chal­lenge these films present is not how to reject soci­ety, but rather how to main­tain a true sense of your­self once you return.