Film Review: LAST NIGHT ON EARTH (2024): End-times Story asks Good Questions, Doesn’t Have Strong Answers

Last Night on Earth Review

Last Night on Earth (2024) Film Review, a movie directed and written by Marcos Efron, and starring Leven Rambin, Jake McLaughlin, Shane West, Dee Wallace, Sohvi Rodriguez, Katie Keene, and Jackson Davis.

Last Night on Earth is a movie that will engage viewers with a mystery, but ultimately leave them feeling unfulfilled and wishing the material had been approached differently. While it raises some interesting ideas in the post-apocalyptic genre and ultimately falls short, its execution is often enough to trigger some introspection, which might make this one worth your while.

Seeing the logo for Uncork’d Entertainment is quickly becoming the new Full Moon Pictures experience: the realization that the movie you’re about to watch was picked up by a distribution company with low standards, remarkably bad taste, and a very inspired media department. So imagine my surprise when, on starting Last Night on Earth and seeing that logo, it turned out the movie wasn’t just watchable, but actually decent?

Playing into modern anxieties about meteors hitting our planet as a way to cope with an increasingly stressful status quo, The Last Night on Earth picks up with Holly (Leven Rambin) and Ryan (Jake McLaughlin) spending quality time in the wilderness, living out of a camper. They are eerily nonplussed when a wayward dog leads them to another family, who have all committed suicide together in a tent. Considering the marketing of the movie and its title, it’s an odd choice to make its entire premise play out like a twist, but once we get past that awkwardness, the movie’s depiction of tranquility in the face of total existential destruction are somewhat successful. Holly and Ryan are interrupted by Gene and Gabby (Shane West and Sohvi Rodriguez), another couple who seem to be similarly spending their remaining hours together, but have their own sinister designs on our heroes.

The plot is, sadly, the weakest part of the movie, and comes across as writer and director Marcos Efron trying to use the apocalyptic framing to say something deeper about the savagery inherent in human nature, which is unsuccessful, considering our protagonists aren’t really tempted from their angelic natures at any point. This is also not a movie that explores the downfall of society in any way. In fact, the flashbacks to the night the world learns of their oncoming doom feel more like an afterthought than any real kind of important detail, almost as if the director was told those scenes had to be in the movie as part of the genre. Still, Last Night on Earth manages to find time to give its characters time to reflect on their mortality, and invites its viewers to muse over how they might spend their last hours, should they find themselves with the knowledge that the world they know will soon end.

It should be noted that Dee Wallace puts in a very unconventional performance in a small, yet impactful role that elevates the material ever so slightly; leading a small encampment of Christian refugees, ostensibly spending their last hours in each other’s company peacefully praying, her character brings a chilling quality to the seeming remoteness of the wilderness.

Last Night on Earth isn’t as successful as other pieces of media with similar themes, such as Netflix’s Carol & the End of the World, which explores this exact story with infinitely more tact and sensitivity, but it still manages to stand out in a film market saturated with big budget special effects and bloated runtimes by providing a few genuine moments of peace and quiet in a world gone mad.

Rating: 4/10

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