Music in Film 04: Last Night (1998)

I had been writing about films I saw in 2024 that featured a strong musical element but somehow became sidetracked. Now I return to this important endeavour. You can see previous posts in this series here (The Zone of Interest, Perfect Days, etc.), here (All You Need Is Death, Eno, The Colour of Pomegranates, Portishead, Lone Star), and here (Star Wars, The Long Goodbye, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat).

Now I turn to Last Night, Don McKellar's film about Toronto people getting ready for the world to end at midnight. It follows a number of different people as they prepare in various different ways, but it focuses on Patrick, played by McKellar himself, who has decided to spend his last hours alone, to the consternation of his family. The film manages to be both sad and quirkily humorous, sometimes at the same time.

But what of music? Well there is plenty of it. Every so often we hear the voice of this radio DJ who is counting down through the greatest songs of all time ("as chosen by me"), all of which are soft rock classics. Then there is this guy who is frantically trying to have as much sex as possible with as many different people as possible before the world ends, and each time he is about to get down to it he puts on this sexy funk tune (which investigation suggests might be Parliament's "I've Been Watching You (Move Your Sexy Body)"). At another point there is a news report on people who are spending their last hours taking part in the world's largest ever guitar jam (which looks totally awesome). And then there is a piano concert being put on by this dorky guy the main character went to school with. As he plays his music we see the audience in the concert hall, some of them people we have seen previously, and the music (by Howard Shore) is indescribably beautiful and definitely the kind of thing I would want to listen to as the world comes to an end (except there are a million other things I would want to listen to and do in those last moments).

It was definitely great seeing this film again some 26 years after I last saw it. It still delivers and it is something that I think should be seen as a real classic of the niche "world coming to an unavoidable end" genre of films. I also had the poignant moment of looking up biographies of some of the less famous people in the film and discovering that McKellar's own life had sadly repeated aspects of his film character's prehistory, fortunately without the world then ending.

I should perhaps mention that the screening in the IFI was preceded by an introduction by Dorian Lynskey, who was pimping his book Everything Must Go, about the end of the world in cinema (the book's title comes from an early onscreen image in McKellar's film). He made the bold claim that Last Night was the first film to show ordinary people doing fairly ordinary things as the world's end approached, and I had immediate "O RLY?" thoughts as I thought of the films On The Beach (1959) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), both screened previously in the IFI.

images:

Last Night poster (Wikipedia)

Everything Must Go (Picador)