Don McKellar's "Last Night" - a Canadian movie masterpiece

"Tell me something to make me love you", Sandra Oh implores Don McKellar's lonely, withdrawn widower in the 1999 movie, Last Night. They are young, attractive and alone together in his apartment. They are not lovers and given the premise of the film, we know that there is no chance of their becoming lovers. At this point in the movie, everyone on earth has a matter of minutes left to live. The world is about to end and, this being a Canadian movie, there is no chance of Bruce Willis appearing to halt the apocalypse.

I first saw "Last Night" just after the century turned - in the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill. I was alone. After I came out, I headed straight into the nearest bar and ordered a Margarita. I was deeply shaken but absurdly happy to be alive. "Life-enhancing" and "Life-affirming" have become New Age cliches. But this severely under-rated film deserves both epithets.

McKellar's film leads us through the last night on earth. We are in an un-named Toronto and enter the story in the early evening. McKellar will lead us through those last hours as his group of characters live out their final moments on a doomed planet. We are never told why the world is ending or just how it will end. There is a brief reference to social breakdown "When the government closed down," and a lurid sunlight shines relentlessy even as midnight approaches. Environmental catastrophe? War of the Worlds? We do not know and it doesn't matter.

But the ordinary people in this film do matter. McKellar plays Patrick, the repressed widower. At the opening of the film, he is headed to one of those obligatory family gatherings - a Christmas dinner with his family. But it is only Christmas for his mother who has chosen the traditional holiday as her ideal way of leaving the world. A pair of old aunts watch old home movies on the sofa, a turkey is roasted but Patrick insists on going home to be alone. He has recently lost a beloved wife; when your private world has come to an end, how much can you grieve for the end of everything and everybody?

As he makes his way through city streets, littered with trashed and abandoned cars, marauding looters and lost souls, he meets Sandra Oh. Where Patrick has lost love, Oh's character has recently found it- in a serenely happy second marriage. Whether he wants to or not, Patrick will be drawn, at this absolute last minute, back into life. Sandra is determined to die with her husband, out of cell phone reach across town. As an inane radio DJ counts down the world's final top one hundred, Sandra persuades Patrick to help her find her husband. Their quest brings them in contact with a handful of people - each with their own way of facing the end.

When I rented this film in Vancouver's Videomatica, a young staff member with tattoes and a stud in her tongue, told me that, for her, the last scene of this film is one of the most powerful in movies. She’s right. “Last Night” made me feel more urgent about and more in love with life than any other film of recent memory.