Tilda Swinton narrates the bleak future of humanity in the only feature directed by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.
“Last and First Men” is the only feature directed by the Icelandic film composer Johann Johannsson (“Sicario”), who died suddenly in 2018. According to the producer Thor Sigurjonsson in notes provided for journalists, his death occurred late in the filmmaking process, just before “we were about to start on the final music.”
Yet even describing “Last and First Men” as a movie, while accurate, is misleading; it often feels closer to a literary exercise or fine-art photography. (A live, multimedia version was shown in 2017.) It combines a complex, “Dune”-like mythology with the sonorous, hypnotic line readings of the British essay films of Patrick Keiller (“Robinson in Ruins”).
Based on the 1930 science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon, the film mainly consists of 16-millimeter black-and-white images of abandoned monuments, identified in the credits as being in the Balkans. No humans appear. While the camera surveys the asymmetries of the monolithic sculptures, often pondering the sky through negative space in the stonework, Tilda Swinton delivers a voice-over that begins with an epic poem-style invocation (“listen patiently”) and is framed as a dispatch from two billion years from now, when our descendants, bracing for extinction, share a telepathic hive mind and have appearances that would look grotesque to us.
The landscape, with the occasional sight of a bird or a cloud streak from an airplane, pierces the illusion that we’re observing the colonized Neptune that Swinton speaks of. Color — in the green of an oscilloscope or in the fiery hues of the sun — intermittently punctures the monochrome. And Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project is always striking to the eye even in moments when the narrative lulls.
Last and First Men
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
