New Zealand maestro Geoff Murphy’s next film after mad Kiwi western Utu couldn’t have been more of a change of pace. Bruno Lawrence is a worker on a nebulously- defined ‘government scientific project’, which goes wrong and wipes out every living thing on Earth, except for (it seems) Lawrence. For the first half of the film, Lawrence wanders the deserted country, looting shops, pissing about with trains, berating cardboard cut- outs of historical figures, and slowly descending from anarchic delight into lonely depression. Then he discovers another, female, survivor, and the inevitable romance starts to develop, only to be stymied when a third, a massively-build Maori, turns up. The film then becomes a three-way emotional stand-off, before further scientific ‘events’ lead to an ambiguous, if not downright weird, ending.
