Last Night

What are you planning for the Millenium? Or, more pertinently, what would you plan if it was the last night on earth? Canadian actor-turned-director Don McKellar has taken this simple premise and worked it into a haunting and eloquent film examining the emotions and actions of people readying themselves for The End.

Set over the last six hours of the planet, Last Night follows an interconnected group: family, friends, co-workers, teachers and strangers. Patrick (McKellar) escapes a family "Christmas" dinner to spend his last hours on his own. His friend Craig (Keith Rennie), who has spent the last two months enacting out his every sexual fantasy, is frantically trying to fulfill the last few - including sleeping with his high school French teacher - before time runs out. Sandra is planning to make it home and be with her husband, but with the world gone awry, so do her plans. Her car is trashed, there's no public transport and the countdown has begun.

While Last Night starts out as a millenial horror flick played out against a constant rumble of background anarchy and impending apocalyse, it subtly shifts into a powerful film about interconnecting human relationships. Intelligently acted and with a sly sense of humour, it soon becomes irrelevant why the world is ending: it's the journey that matters, not the destination. And despite the inevitability of Last Night's plot outcome, its finale is surprisingly life-affirming. McKellar, already one of Canada's leading actors (Exotica, eXistenZ) and a screenwriter of some note (he had a hand in cult classics Roadkill and Highway 61), proves himself an equally adept director. Last Night, his eccentric and quirky movie, propels him into the company of other Canadian filmmakers such as David Cronenberg (who stars in Last Night as a gas company executive), Atom Egoyan and Denys Arcand, who - love them or loathe them - are fully in command of their highly individual vision.

Reviewed by Monika Maurer

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