Uncivilized (2019)

I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into with this one, and that's exactly why it caught me so off guard. Uncivilized is a documentary made by an amateur filmmaker called Michael Lees, who decides to pack up his life and disappear into the jungle of Dominica for six months. No distractions, no noise, no civilisation. Just himself, the wilderness, and whatever he might find when he strips everything back. And for a while, it plays out exactly as you'd expect from that premise.

The early stretch genuinely reminded me of Into the Wild. There's that same restless searching quality, that hunger to get away from the modern world and locate something more honest underneath it all. Watching Lees set up camp and begin to settle into the rhythms of jungle life, I found myself thinking: this is what Christopher McCandless might have made if he'd had a camera and a hard drive. There's something raw and self-aware about it. He's not pretending to be some seasoned survivalist. He's a man doing something difficult, filming it himself, and being pretty candid about the experience.

And then the film completely changes shape. A Category 5 hurricane tears through Dominica and absolutely decimates everything in its path. The island is wrecked. Lees' six-month plan is shredded in a matter of hours. What was a film about one man's personal journey into the wild becomes something else entirely: a story about destruction, community and the very real human cost of climate change. The pivot is jarring, and I mean that in the best possible way. It doesn't feel manipulative or constructed. It just happened. That's the world we're living in now.

What strikes me most is how the hurricane reframes everything that came before it. All that soul-searching about detaching from civilisation suddenly feels different when civilisation, or at least the infrastructure that holds people's lives together, is torn apart against their will. Lees isn't choosing to leave society anymore. Society, in a sense, has been taken from the people around him. So he pivots. He turns the camera outward and starts documenting the aftermath, helping his family rebuild, and bearing witness to just how devastating this kind of climate event really is.

It's eye-opening stuff. Not in a preachy, lecturing sort of way, but in the quiet, accumulative way that the best documentaries work. You're not being told how to feel. You're just watching the reality of it unfold.

I should say, as a piece of filmmaking craft, this is amateur work. Lees isn't a trained filmmaker, and you can feel that in places. The structure is loose and the production is obviously modest. But honestly, that's part of what makes it work. There's no gloss here. No narrator smoothing everything into a tidy arc. It feels lived-in and genuine, and I'd take that over something more polished but less honest any day of the week.

This was part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, with Dominica ticked off the list, and I'm really glad this was the film I landed on. It's the kind of documentary that sticks around in your head a bit longer than you expected. Part personal essay, part disaster chronicle, part climate warning, and entirely worth your time.

Four stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-06-10

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store
Physical: Amazon US

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