Last Night is set in Toronto and it follows the interconnected stories of various people in the last six hours of the world. We see how they each deal with the impending apocalypse in different ways. The main cast consists of Sandra Oh, David Cronenberg, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Genevieve Bujold and a few more.
As much as I love big disaster movies and saving the world from impending destruction, I prefer these movies where we see what people would actually do in the last few hours of the world. The actual cause of the end of the world is never discussed but there are subtle hints and you can piece together an idea of what’s happening, but the focus is on the characters as they come together. Some have a final Christmas as a family, one guy is trying to cross off as many sexual fantasies from his list as he can, and some just want to be alone.
Last Night is a comedy and there are many funny moments and situations, but there’s a bittersweet undercurrent that is threaded through the film, and really comes out as the end approaches, especially when we witness two friends say goodbye.
‘See you later.’
‘No, you won’t.’
It’s little moments like these that bring forth the tragedy, and these are sprinkled throughout the film, providing a high sense of drama without any big explosions. The backgrounds can be harrowing and the director manages to sculpt a deep world in a short amount of time. It’s the perfect example of ‘show, don’t tell’. For example, in one scene two characters are walking along the street and in the background we see a building on fire, but nobody even cares.
It’s quite similar to the Steve Carell and Keira Knightley film Seeking a Friend for the End of World, and I think that film took a few cues from Last Night. The tension ramps up towards the end of the film as we realize we’re witnessing these characters’ last moments, and it makes us think of who we’d want to be with or what we’d want to be doing. Would we want to be with our family or with a large group of people in a park, or just with the person we love?
This is a really great movie and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
