Last Night

The world will end in six hours. How is never said; no reason is given anywhere and nobody argues about it. Everyone has known for months and has made their arrangements. In Toronto a few people spend the last hours: one eats a pretend Christmas dinner with his family, one is working through a list of sexual experiences, one walks the streets, one works at the gas company and telephones customers one by one to say that service will continue to the end. Don McKellar writes, directs and takes one of the leads. Sandra Oh is in the cast, and the director David Cronenberg plays the gas company executive. The decision is to refuse the genre: no catastrophe, no escape, no rescue operation. The narrative is interested only in what people do. The streets are not empty; people are out, celebrating, and the violence rises through the evening. The film keeps that in the background. Cronenberg's character is its strangest idea: an employee of an institution who keeps doing the job to the end. It screened at the Cannes film festival in 1998 and received a special mention in the first film award. It is short and moves close to real time; the last scene was shot in a single take. Who it is for: viewers who like Canadian independent cinema and unusual narratives of the end. Who it is not for: there is no action, the pace is low, and the film explains nothing.