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Review

It's evening in Toronto, and the world will be ending at midnight. No explanation is given, but the news stations keep mentioning it, so it's apparently sunk in for the residents. How do the various citizens react when faced with their own premature mortality? This is the intriguing premise behind writer-director McKellar's Last Night, which goes beyond the usual apocalyptic drama to satirize our worker-colony cities and provide a darkly uplifting portrait of what some people are capable of when they let their emotions free. Surrounded by the usual rioters and looters, many characters are introduced, including a dryly funny Cronenberg as a gas company worker who's working alphabetically through the customer list, thanking them for their loyalty, and Rennie as a man trying to fulfill his sexual fantasies with as many people as possible. But Oh has bigger plans, wanting to take fate into her own hands and commit suicide with her husband. Unable to connect through the gridlock, she runs into McKellar; their connection is the center of the carousel of interconnected people spinning around them. The poignancy comes when least expected, for the audience and for the characters alike, in this restrained, deeply satisfying portrait of intellectual armageddon.

 -- David Gorgos