Geoff Murphy’s New Zealand film about a scientist who wakes to find everyone gone is at its best when Bruno Lawrence has the planet to himself. Once other people arrive it turns smaller and more ordinary, then closes on an image we have not forgotten.
Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) wakes in a motel room at twelve minutes past six and the world has emptied. Geoff Murphy’s film, adapted from Craig Harrison’s novel by Sam Pillsbury, Bill Baer and Lawrence himself, spends its first half hour on one man alone in New Zealand, and that half hour is as good as anything the last-man genre has produced. The rest is a good film, with two more people in it and a smaller idea, and it closes on an image that has stayed with us for weeks. We recommend it, and we recommend paying closest attention early.
Murphy and his cinematographer James Bartle shoot the emptiness plainly. Wide streets in flat morning light, a petrol station with nobody at the pumps, a lorry idling in the road, and Zac walking through it in a suit calling out. There is no trick photography and there does not need to be; the effect is made by keeping the frame wide and letting nothing move in it. We were unnerved in a way we had not expected from a film this old, and it was the sound that did it. Murphy strips it down to footsteps, wind, a radio hissing on every band, and John Charles’s score, which arrives in low electronic tones and leaves again before it can become comforting.
Zac does what a person actually might. He drives into the city and puts out a broadcast asking anyone left to find him. He goes back to the laboratory where he worked on a project he begins to suspect is responsible. Then he moves into a large house on a hill, puts on a woman’s slip, sets up cardboard cutouts of the great and the terrible on the lawn and addresses them from the balcony as president of this quiet earth. Later he takes a shotgun into a church and gives God a deadline. It is funny and then it is not, and Lawrence manages the turn without ever signalling it. He plays Zac as a tidy, reasonable, slightly pompous man whose reason is a thin coat, and he lets us watch it wear through.
Michael J. Horton cuts this section with real economy: a scene runs until the point has been made and no further, which is why 91 minutes feels shorter than it is. Josephine Ford’s production design gives the mansion the look of money, with polished floors and stopped clocks, and gives the laboratory a grey institutional dullness that makes Zac’s guilt about the place seem reasonable. Michael Kane’s costumes carry a good deal of the comedy, the slip and the borrowed finery Zac picks up as his sense of occasion grows.
Then Joanne (Alison Routledge) arrives, and later Api (Pete Smith), and the film becomes a triangle. This is where most of the critics’ reservations sit, and ours sit there too. Routledge is good, sharper and steadier than the writing gives her credit for, and Smith brings a wariness to Api that the film needs. But the three-hander is ordinary in a way the solo section never is. The jealousies are the ones you would predict, the arguments arrive on schedule, and the question of what happened to everyone else, which the film has kept alive so carefully, is set aside for stretches while people sulk in separate rooms. The cast list is six names long and three of them barely register.
The last-man film has a long history, from The World, the Flesh and the Devil in 1959 to The Omega Man in 1971, and nearly all of them make the same move: the solitude is the interesting part and the arrival of other people is the plot. Murphy knows this. What he adds is an explanation clever enough to bear thinking about, and a final image, which we will not describe, that is the reason the film is still discussed. It sent us back to the beginning to check what we had missed.
It is a 15 certificate for the shotgun and the slip, and neither will trouble anyone much. Watch it alone, if you can arrange it. The house will feel larger afterwards.
