Last Words

The year is 2086, and the world is in the wake of a climate catastrophe. A nameless narrator (Kalipha Touray) tells his story: two years earlier, he escaped from London, which was flooded by a poisoned sea, to a Paris that was being deserted. There, his sister—the last pregnant woman on Earth—was brutally murdered. The desperate young man then met an old man (Nick Nolte) who shows films from the Cineteca di Bologna archives, which serve as the protagonists’ last link with the world before the catastrophe. They hit the road together... Last Words, the latest film by the independent American director Jonathan Nossiter, is a tribute to cinema, on the one hand, and a ruthless dystopia, on the other. It’s rife with horror, which may recall John Hillcoat’s The Road, as well as the sort of magic seen in Benh Zeitlin Beasts of the Southern Wild. The international co-production, based on a novel by the Argentinean writer Santiago Amigorena, was made with a star-studded cast that includes Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård, and Alba Rohrwacher.