“August 21,” reads the caption that opens The Last Anniversary – and in keeping with the last word in the film’s title, this is exactly ten years to the day since the marriage of Aubrey (Jesse McQueen) and Tom (Kenneth Northfield), who have now returned to reprise the event with “the majority of the head wedding table”. If that caption is a little like the timestamps that regularly punctuate Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), then this film too is set in a remote, snowbound hotel that has been abandoned for the winter, and whose liminal corridors echo with ghosts (a “mausoleum of memories”, as one character will later put it). Yet the word ‘last’ in the opening caption does not carry the same meaning as in, say, Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), suggestive of regular reunions – for this is the first time that most of these friends have seen once another in the intervening decade – but rather it denotes something more final. After all, that caption is followed immediately by another that reads matter-of-factly (and accurately), “the last day on earth.”
For this film, written, directed, produced, edited and shot by ‘the Butler brothers’ Brett and Jason, is, like their fellow-Canadian Don McKellar’s Last Night (1998) and Camille Griffin’s Silent Night (2021), set on the eve of a global mass-destruction event that, while never explained, every character knows is coming – and although that knowledge of imminent death is not really the film’s central theme, it does serve to intensify the unfolding drama, and to give urgency to the need for these people to relive their pasts, clear the air, clean the slates (and the sheets), unburden their consciences and perhaps settle some scores over what happened in this hotel ten years earlier. For with judgment day just hours away, all these characters are also facing, and perhaps even seeking, a more personal apocalypse.
This is, after all, a strange gathering. Why would the married couple’s six guests travel so far, and under such extreme circumstances, to reconnect with people they have not bothered to contact in a decade, for what is to be their last night on earth? Perhaps it makes sense that the ex-cop Binky (Ry Barrett) should be there – after all, he is Tom’s devoted brother. Yet punkish tearaway Devon (Honor Spencer), bearded hippie River (Michael Masurkevitch) and bona fide rock star Gail (Manon Ens-Lapointe) all ought to have better things to do in these final hours, while couple Lisa (Jessica Vano) and Rick (Kevin Courtney) have even abandoned their own young children to see in the end of days with people they hardly regard anymore as friends. Yet all these people are bound together by more than just a wedding, and none could resist the call to their final reckoning.
None that is except Aubrey’s sister and maid of honour Brenda (Jenna Vittoria), who mysteriously vanished during the original wedding party, never to be found again – but the hotel, and some of the characters, remain haunted by her ghostly (yet hands-on) presence, and many seem terrified, again in shades of The Shining, by a particular room with an unspeakable history. As these folk drink and do drugs, bicker and fuck, and find themselves drawn, like moths to a flame, to what they have tried so hard to forget, there is, amid all the lies, guilt and recrimination, still satisfaction to be had for some – before it is too late.
Like The Big Chill (1983), this brings the whole gang back together to rake over the coals of their shared past – yet unlike Lawrence Kasdan’s film, in The Last Anniversary there is no future left for them to negotiate and navigate, together or apart, leaving only regret and eleventh-hour revenge. Ultimately, there is nothing left for any of these characters anyway, as they have all timed their personal catastrophes with the end of days, and driven their narratives to their natural dead ends. And so this film’s ordinary, extraordinary 21st August, and the brief new dawn that follows, are like any day in the life of human moral existence, while also being an occasion for Biblical revelations and final judgments.
strap: Belated satisfaction: Brett and Jason Butler’s apocalyptic revenger sees friends reunited in a haunted hotel in the middle of nowhere and at the end of the world
© Anton Bitel
