Darkness.
The sound of wind.
Eerie music.
Clouds against a bright, monochrome sky.
And something huge, a vast slab of concrete like a monolith, which we gradually see has a very different shape.
And then a voice, speaking for the very last of the Human race, Two Thousand Million Years from now, speaks to us, to tell us her story and ours…
This is a strange and unsettling film. It doesn’t fit into any of the neat cinematic categories and breaks filmmaking rule after filmmaking rule. It adapts a book most people thought could never be adapted, but does so in the strangest, most abstract and surreal way imaginable.
Jóhann Jóhannsson was an Icelandic composer who scored such films as Sicario and Arrival (2016). But he dreamed of making this film, and back in 2017, presented a rough cut of the film with a live, orchestral performance of his score at the Manchester International Festival. Sadly, he died in 2018 of a drug overdose, but his friends and colleagues finished the film, and this strange, art house science fiction film is the result.
There are three separate components to this film, which interact in strange but not obvious ways: There is the eerie, whispering score with its associated sounds of wind and noise; there are the strange and surreal images of a War Monument in what used to be Yugoslavia, a bizarre, brutalist set of structures stained by long exposure to the weather, their surfaces worn and crumbling; finally, there is Tilda Swinton’s narration which is calm and precise and dipassionate, but yet with a hint that there may be hidden depths of emotion under that placid surface. At times, it seems as if two of these elements pause and wait for a while while the third does something which we might recognize as important if we could see all the past, present and future, as the narrator claims she can.
Jóhannsson abridged and adapted the text straight from Olaf Stapledon’s very strange novel of the same name, and it is as eerie and unsettling as the rest of the film. In the future, future man — the new species evolved from us which has taken our place (and which, it is hinted, might be quite monstrous to our eyes) — is doomed. Using its incredible mental powers and its ability to work as a single super mind, they are now sending us a message — a warning, and a request for our aid, although it is never quite clear what it is they want from us.
There are a few flashes of color, but they don’t last long. Instead we see the stark and brooding mass of the monuments against cloudy skies, distant mountains and mist. The end result is cold and chilly and yet eternally fascinating.
You probably already know what you will think of this one. If the prospect of sitting for over an hour, listening to someone talk horrifies you, then you do not want to watch this one. If you love movies which are strange and elusive, which push artistic boundaries and offer strange beauty, then you will need to see this one.
It may not be a great classic — it may not even be entirely successful as an experiment. But you won’t find anything else out there quite like it.
And in my book that’s enough reason to watch almost any movie…
rivets on the poster 