A Film Canon

Possibly the quietest post-apocalyptic film ever made, Geoff Murphy's adaptation of Craig Harrison's novel turns on an elegantly simple premise - Zac (Bruno Lawrence), a New Zealand scientist, wakes up one morning to find that everyone has vanished. For roughly the first half of the film, Murphy's tone is sufficiently varied and nuanced to allow Zac to do little more than wander around Auckland and its environs, only encountering the occasional corpse, in an effort to consider what role his contribution to an American-New Zealand nuclear alliance might have played in this catastrophe. At first, Murphy imbues the city with a haunting, melancholy desecration that anticipates 28 Days Later and I Am Legend, moving on to a more quotidian register and, finally, a mild absurdism - a trajectory that mirrors Zac's movement from his original, individuated astonishment, to his performance of every identity that the city could possibly offer or imply, to his megalomaniacal subsumption of all those identities into a fascist delusion that puts him on the brink of psychosis, transforms him into a temporary American, and even subsumes Murphy's directorial distance into his arrangement of a quasi-cinematic spectacle around the mirrors and balconies of his appropriated house. What makes this trajectory even more powerful is that Murphy simultaneously presents it as Zac's attempt to match his voice to radiation, to radiate his voice as far as the boundaries of the nuclear fallout, if indeed it has any boundaries. This produces a kind of aesthetic of radiation, and of all the other invisible conditions or impediments to human existence, that sees the voice converging with white noise into a white voice, a silent generator become generator of silence, whose displaced buzzing, humming and vibrating finds its visual corollary in the most striking index of apocalyptic disturbance - a road surface marker gone off course, its white line hurtling off the road and across the countryside. This white voice also contextualises the dynamic between Zac and the other two survivors, which suggests that his crime, or complicity, is peculiarly associated with the Maori peoples, cautioning New Zealand against nuclear relations with the United States by positioning it as a return to colonialism, but this time in the role of the colonised. It's a poised, haunting film, living up to Zac's observation that the entire substance of the universe has changed, and become unstable, and beautifully contextualising the unusual stasis between the characters - despite an ostensible love triangle, every conversation feels incidental, beside the point, oblivious -  by way of Zac's final recognition that they've only survived by virtue of being at the very moment of death when the fallout struck. Unlike most apocalypse films, then, which attempt to construe an afterlife within recognisable geographical co-ordinates, Murphy's vision is more of the moment just before death, perhaps explaining the incommensurability of his abstract, sci-fi montages with the hushed world through which the characters move, as well as the complicated temporal and ontological ramifications of the fact that Zac wasn't merely on the cusp of death, but on the cusp of death by suicide as a result of precisely the sense of complicity he recovers throughout the film, as if to position the legacy of the colonial project as an ongoing dialectic of guilt and reparation, or of a reparation that can never move beyond its own narcissistic self-hatred in the way needed to productively admit guilt.