Last Night
What are you doing for the end of the world?
Last Night
Rated R
Starring Don McKellar, Sandra Oh, David Cronenberg and Trent McMullen
Written and Directed by Don McKellar
Warner Brothers
96 Minutes
MSRP $24.98 DVD
Review by Curt Wohleber
The world is going to end in six hours and Patrick (McKellar) just wants to be left alone. Even on the brink of apocalypse, however, mundane matters intrude. He makes a token appearance at his parents' house, where his mother pretends it's Christmas. Before he can retreat to the solitude of his apartment, a woman named Sandra (Oh) begs him to help her find a way across town so she can spend the last hours of life on Earth with her husband.
Patrick does his best to aid the damsel in distress, but unlike typical movie heroes, he doesn't have the slightest idea how to hotwire a car. He tries to get an old high school friend to give Sandra a ride, but the friend is busy passing out tickets to his first--and last, of course--piano recital, scheduled for one hour before the fatal stroke of midnight. Their quest brings them to the apartment of another friend, Alex (McMullen), who is busy working his way through a laundry list of sexual exploits, including trysts with a black woman, his high school French teacher, and a virgin.
As the hours slip by, Patrick and Sandra become resigned to the fact that they have little choice but to spend Armageddon with each other. Sandra has her own plan to defy cruel fate, while for Patrick, who is haunted by tragedy, the world effectively ended a long time ago. In the brief time remaining, can these two strangers forge a bond that will give some meaning to their final moments?
An intimate look at Armageddon
Last Night saw very limited release in the United States, but is now available on DVD. Writer-actor-director Don McKellar conceived the film as a sort of counterpoint to movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact. Instead of focusing on heroes and their high-tech hardware, Last Night looks at the lives of ordinary people in Toronto as time runs out for the human race. The film's clockwork doomsday evokes not just Y2K hysteria (remember all that?) but also the sense of an impending execution. Though we never learn why the world is going to end, it feels more like the act of an uncaring cosmic bureaucracy than some astronomical phenomenon.
McKellar shows us the expected looting and rioting, but perhaps the most chilling moments are the darkly comic episodes of eerie normality. A gas company executive (played by noted director David Cronenberg) calls his customers one by one, thanking them for their business and promising every effort to keep the gas flowing until the very end. A radio DJ plays the top 500 songs of all time while a local television station offers inane coverage of the last news that will ever be.
In the role of an emotionally repressed widower, McKellar plays his part almost too well, shielding the audience from his character's grief. By contrast, Oh conveys Sandra's growing desperation with an intensity that's sometimes painful to watch. As she prepares to end her life with Patrick, she delivers what is both the film's funniest and most poignant line, impatiently imploring Patrick, "Tell me something to make me love you."
When I saw When Worlds Collide as a kid, I remember wondering what it would have been like for the people who didn't get away in the spaceship. Last Night provides a haunting yet curiously hopeful answer. -- Curt
Return To Reviews
