The Divide

The Geometry of Despair

In the modern cinematic landscape, documentaries regarding economics often fall into one of two traps: they are either driveline lectures filled with dizzying graphs or agitprop outraged enough to exhaust the viewer but too scattered to convince them. Katharine Round’s *The Divide* (2015) elegantly sidesteps both. Inspired by the sociopolitical treatise *The Spirit Level* by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the film is less a lecture on fiscal policy and more a psychological horror story about the invisible lines that partition our societies. It does not merely ask why we are poor or rich; it asks why the gap between those two states has rendered us all—regardless of our tax bracket—profoundly unwell.



Round’s directorial eye is not investigative, but atmospheric. She eschews the shaky-cam "verité" aesthetic often associated with poverty documentaries in favor of a polished, almost suffocatingly cinematic visual language. The cinematography by Woody James captures the glass towers of New York and the grey, rain-slicked streets of Glasgow with the same detached, cool beauty. This is a crucial stylistic choice. By making the environments look slick and high-definition, Round emphasizes the artifice of the "meritocracy." The world looks beautiful, yet the people inhabiting it are breaking. The visual splendor serves as an ironic counterpoint to the internal decay of the seven subjects we follow, creating a dissonance that hums in the background like a faulty fluorescent light.

The film’s true structural coup is its refusal to paint the wealthy merely as villains. Instead, it presents them as prisoners of the same geometry that traps the poor. We meet Alden, a Wall Street psychologist who theoretically embodies the apex of the capitalist dream. Yet, he is a man hollowed out by anxiety, working himself into the ground to afford a lifestyle in a gated community where he feels perpetually insecure. His story is juxtaposed with Leah, a KFC worker in Virginia, and Rochelle, a care worker in the UK. While Leah and Rochelle face the visceral violence of hunger and debt, Alden faces the spiritual violence of isolation. The film argues that inequality is not just a deprivation of resources for the bottom, but a generator of neurosis for the top. The "divide" is not a wall; it is a contagion.



There is a haunting sequence involving Jen, a resident of a Sacramento gated community, who speaks of her neighbors not with community spirit, but with a paranoid fear of judgment. She is terrified of not fitting in, of slipping down the ladder. This is the film’s central thesis made flesh: when the rungs of the ladder are too far apart, the fear of falling paralyzes everyone. Round weaves these personal narratives with archival footage of Thatcher and Reagan, ghost-like figures whose policy decisions decades ago set these tectonic plates in motion. The editing connects the macro-political to the micro-personal with devastating precision, showing how abstract economic theories eventually manifest as a care worker crying over a catalogue debt she cannot pay.



Ultimately, *The Divide* is a tragedy about the loss of social cohesion. It posits that we have traded community for competition, and in doing so, we have built a world that is fundamentally lonely. It is not a "call to action" in the traditional sense of asking you to sign a petition; it is a mirror held up to a fractured civilization. The film leaves us with the unsettling realization that the economy is not a weather system we must endure, but a machine we built—one that is currently grinding its operators to dust. It is a sombre, necessary watch that demands we look not just at our bank accounts, but at our neighbors, and ask what this distance is costing us.