Originally intended to be part of the \u201c2000 Seen by\u2026\u201d film series<\/a> (alongside such other apocalypse-minded entries as Hal Hartley\u2019s The Book of Life<\/em> and Tsai Ming-liang\u2019s The Hole<\/em>), Last Night<\/em> was instead fashioned into a standalone feature by writer\/director\/star Don McKellar, who saw the opportunity to craft an ensemble drama with his own character, architect Patrick Wheeler, as the link between all the others.<\/p>\n In fact, Patrick\u2019s voice is the first one heard in the film, albeit on his answering machine (remember those?) when he receives a message from a gas company flack (played by David Cronenberg) thanking him for being a loyal customer and assuring him Petrolia \u201cwill do our utmost to keep the gas flowing right until the end.\u201d Also \u201cwith you until the end\u201d is the radio DJ counting down the top 500 songs of all time, a countdown heavy on \u201970s soft-rock hits that is due to reach its conclusion at the stroke of midnight, when an unspecified cataclysm will be bringing about the end of the world as everyone knows it. In the six hours until that comes to pass, though, there\u2019s plenty of time for people to come together, sometimes in the most literal sense.<\/p>\n Patrick\u2019s first stop is a family dinner that his high-strung mother has turned into an ersatz Christmas celebration complete with presents \u2013 and all the heightened emotions such gatherings bring. (His sister, incidentally, is played by Sarah Polley, who would join McKellar in the cast of Cronenberg\u2019s cyberthriller eXistenZ<\/em> the following year.) Patrick has promised to stay for a few hours, but his ultimate plan is to be home alone when the end comes, for reasons that aren\u2019t made clear until time is nearly up.<\/p>\n As for Sandra\u2019s husband, Duncan, he\u2019s eventually revealed to be Cronenberg\u2019s gas company man, who\u2019s staying at the office until he\u2019s personally called every last customer in their database. Besides him, the only employee in the building is his mousy assistant Donna (Tracy Wright), who is manning the lone computer terminal needed to monitor the gas flow. While Duncan is able to make it to their well-appointed home without incident, Sandra finds public transportation isn\u2019t running and is despondently camped out on Patrick\u2019s front step when he arrives at his door. With time running short, finding her a safe ride across town becomes his main goal, but his inability to hotwire a car is as comical as it is unhelpful.<\/p>\n The last major character to be introduced (and one of the last Duncan leaves a message for) is Craig Zwiller (Callum Keith Rennie, another eXistenZ<\/em> vet), who is spending his final hours racking up as many sexual conquests as possible, unapologetically checking off items on his kink bucket list as he goes. \u201cI just wanted to have an orgasm today,\u201d says one of his prospective partners. \u201cI\u2019ll do my best,\u201d Craig replies. Later on, he plays host to his high school French teacher, Mrs. Carlton (Genevieve Bujold), and even propositions Patrick when he shows up with Sandra in tow in the hopes of borrowing one of Craig\u2019s cars. Even as Craig reluctantly agrees to let one of them go, Patrick demurs, explaining that he doesn\u2019t want to risk having bad sex. \u201cI just don\u2019t want that to be the last thing on my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n As midnight draws near, things come to a head for each of the characters, and the social order \u2013 already a fragile thing \u2013 rapidly crumbles. The scene where Duncan meets his premature end at the hands of a shotgun-wielding intruder is especially chilling thanks to Cronenberg\u2019s utterly calm delivery of his last words. (\u201cI\u2019m not afraid of you,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m not afraid of what you can do. You\u2019re the one who\u2019s afraid.\u201d) Still, there are moments of unexpected grace, such as the piano recital one of Patrick and Craig\u2019s mutual acquaintances gives at Petrolia Hall. McKellar could have gone for an easy joke or cringe comedy by making it a train wreck, but the guy is genuinely talented. It\u2019s just a shame it took the world coming to an end for him to be able to demonstrate this in the proper setting.<\/p>\n A similar dynamic is at work in writer\/director\/editor Joel Potrykus\u2019s Relaxer<\/em><\/strong>, which was made in 2018 but set in the latter half of 1999, when Y2K hysteria was reaching a fever pitch. Where Last Night<\/em> bops around Toronto along with its disparate characters, Relaxer stays rooted in a single location, the Belmont, Mich., apartment where unemployed protagonist Abbie (Joshua Burge) is crashing with his brother Cam (David Dastmalchian). In a more extreme version of Don McKellar\u2019s quirky 1998 CBC comedy series Twitch City<\/em>, which was about an agoraphobe who has arranged his life so he never has to leave his apartment, Abbie can\u2019t even get off the couch lest he fail one of Cam\u2019s punishing \u201cchallenges.\u201d The first of these (which Abbie fails in spectacularly humiliating fashion) is to drink a whole gallon of milk, during which he attempts to recreate a glitch in an unbeatable skateboarding video game \u2013 all the while being filmed by Cam\u2019s ever-present Hi8 camera. It\u2019s not long, however, before the \u201cfinal, ultimate challenge\u201d is issued: beating the legendary level 256 of Pac-Man, which Cam generously gives him until New Year\u2019s Eve to accomplish.<\/p>\n Such confusion is part and parcel of Potrykus\u2019s campaign of ambiguity, which extends to the strange powers Abbie apparently begins manifesting whenever he dons the pair of 3D sunglasses he has on hand \u2013 a gift from his absent father. Of course, they could also be hallucinations brought on by the mental exhaustion and severe dehydration he experiences until he manages to expose the pipes in the wall, a moment straight out of The Exterminating Angel<\/em> where Potrykus one-ups Bu\u00f1uel by having Abbie mistakenly tap into the sewer line first. Suffice it to say, the Abbie who\u2019s on the verge of beating Pac-Man five months later while fireworks are being set off outside and the crowds are counting down the seconds to midnight looks very much the worse for wear, but at least he\u2019s gained some survival skills along the way. Those will definitely come in handy when the doomsayers are eventually proved right.<\/p>\n We knew on Jan. 1, 2000, that the hysteria surrounding Y2K had been overblown. But before that, the fears that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":12769,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/lastnight2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Waiting until the last minute to take care of business is a running theme, since the film also introduces a woman named Sandra (Sandra Oh) who is out by herself picking up some essentials before heading home to carry out the suicide pact she\u2019s made with her husband. She\u2019s prevented from doing that, though, by a band of hell-raisers that descends upon her car and tips it over while she\u2019s picking out a bottle of wine.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>True to his word, Abbie remains glued to the couch after Cam leaves, going to extreme lengths to obtain sustenance using the tools he has within reach. (At one point, even the camera tripod gets pressed into service.) Over the course of an increasingly surreal day (or days), Abbie is visited by a friend who fails to bring him the Chuck E. Cheese pizza he asked for and withholds the soda he bought because Abbie has no money, the building\u2019s janitors set off a bug bomb in the apartment, and a former co-worker drops by to check in on him and share the secret to beating the game. \u201cHow long have you been sitting there?\u201d she asks him, to which he responds, \u201cWhat day is it?\u201d (Turns out it\u2019s sometime in July.)<\/p>\n
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