RELEASE DATE: JULY 30TH (BFI Player)

Every race has its time, and Tilda Swinton’s haunting narration emphasises that greatly in Jóhann Jóhannsson’s posthumous hybrid of art, documentary and video installation. Based on British writer and philosopher Olaf Stapleton’s haunting novel, the famous Icelandic composer, known for scoring major films such as Arrival and Sicario, created his own adaptation which is now released a few years after he sadly passed away in 2018.

This is a very curious film to view and analyse on its own, since it involves still images and photography (all presented in grainy, greyscale black and white), music by Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman and Swinton’s narration of the text. This is a peculiarly fascinating way of presenting a story with which not everyone will be on board, with even the most casual of viewers likely to be turned off after the first few minutes. However, if you view this as not a film and more in the vein of a documentary or a major video exhibit you would see at a film/science museum, maybe you’ll be able to appreciate it as a unique telling of a once and future humanity that’s slowly but surely approaching its end.

If you’re a deep film aficionado that can accept and appreciate various forms of storytelling in film, then Last and First Men is highly recommended. It’s a very different approach at telling these kinds of stories, and Jóhannsson is to be highly credited for crafting such a bold examination of human extinction. He even went out to the Balkans and spent a whole month there filming the Spomeniks on 16mm black and white stock. This film is a testament to the man who spent the last few years of his life wanting to bring his personal passion project to reality, and he truly succeeded in achieving that.