“People are always saying, ‘The children. Pity the children.’ I’m tired of the children. They haven’t lived, given birth, watched their friends die. I have invested 80 years in this life. The children don’t know what they’re missing.”
1998’s Last Night (not to be confused with 2010’s Last Night, starring Keira Knightley) is one of the best movies that you likely haven’t seen, but it’s worth starting with a couple of disclaimers.
One is that Last Night is only obscure outside Canada. It’s still one of the country’s most critically successful independent films, with an ensemble cast that was impressive in 1998 and has since become a true murderer’s row: Sandra Oh, Callum Keith Rennie, David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley, Geneviève Bujold. From a Canadian perspective, this article is a little like asking Americans if they’ve ever heard of Clerks.
The other is that this is not a movie you watch to kill an afternoon and then go do something else. Last Night’s Wikipedia entry describes it as a black comedy, which sets up certain expectations that the film arguably doesn’t meet. It has a few laughs, but it’s best described as a bleak but bittersweet drama. It’s the sort of movie you have to sit with for a while after it’s done.
Last Night begins six hours before the end of the world. While no one ever says exactly what’s happening, the entire film is set at night but is consistently lit like it’s midday. Something is about to hit Earth — a meteor, a comet, a gamma-ray burst, whatever — and it’s glowing in the sky like a second sun.
The film follows the last hours of several characters in Toronto as they figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. The imminent apocalypse has been common knowledge for long enough that most of the people we see in the city have already gone through all the stages of grief and into depressed acceptance.
There have been riots and widespread panics, but many have burned themselves out. The only thing left to do is wait. Some people are knocking out as much of their bucket list as they can, others have gathered with their families; and some have taken to the streets to treat the end of the world like New Year’s Eve.
In the middle of this, we catch up with Patrick (writer/director Don McKellar), who just wants to be alone at the end, and Sandra (Oh), who’s stranded in Patrick’s neighborhood after petty vandals trash her car. All Sandra wants to do is get back to her husband Duncan (Cronenberg), and Patrick isn’t quite depressed enough to turn her away. That sends them on a trip across pre-apocalyptic Toronto.
That makes Last Night sound like it might be a road movie, but it really isn’t. Patrick and Sandra are less protagonists than they are audience surrogates, through whom we watch this vision of Toronto as it slowly unspools. The tone of Last Night is more akin to a documentary than anything else, chronicling the end of the world as seen from this particular city and time.
Last Night’s Toronto is in the process of being abandoned, as most of the people who make it work have better things to do in the last few hours of their lives. Some of the characters Patrick and Sandra encounter know exactly what they want to do on their last night on Earth, from the ridiculous to the sublime, while others are paralyzed by choice. It’s hard not to watch and ask yourself the question of where you’d be and what you’d be doing in this situation, and that might be the point.
Almost three decades later, there are a number of obvious points of comparison for Last Night, most prominently Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. For some reason, most of those movies seem to be comedies, which may be part of why Last Night’s ended up regarded as one. Instead, it’s a strange trip through the start of the end, and it’s got at least one scene, or character, or piece of dialogue, that’s likely to stick with you for years to come. If you’ve never watched it before now, it’s worth taking a night to check it out on Prime Video.