Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Last Night
1998 · Don McKellar · Last Night on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how bright and flat the sky stays all night. (light)
Douglas Koch shoots the six hours before midnight in the same even daylight throughout: no dusk, no red sky, no sign of how close the end is.
Payoff: The film refuses cinema's usual clock, a darkening sky, so you cannot see time passing; you can only hear people say it. In the reading: chronosign. With no dusk to mark the hour, people announce the time themselves: what Deleuze calls a chronosign, time given directly instead of through movement.
Watch the family hold a full Christmas dinner, tree included. (staging)
McKellar stages the meal with complete domestic correctness even though it is not December, and lets the scene run long enough for ordinary family irritation to surface.
Payoff: Manners and old grudges outlive any reason to have them; extremity does not transform people, it reveals who they already were. In the reading: the-gest. Performing Christmas outside December is what Deleuze calls a gest: a posture that shows what the ritual was actually for.
Watch the gas company man call every customer, one by one. (performance)
David Cronenberg plays Duncan with total sincerity, courteous and on script, working through a call list that has no purpose left except itself.
Payoff: Work continued past all use becomes its own kind of dignity, absurd and genuine in the same gesture.
Listen for the radio counting down the greatest songs ever. (sound)
A countdown broadcast works through a list of all time favorites as midnight nears, doubling as both a clock and a running ironic commentary.
Payoff: The film has almost no score of its own; ordinary pop culture is left to carry the feeling instead.
Follow how the separate storylines cut faster as midnight nears. (cutting)
Reginald Harkema intercuts several unconnected lives across Toronto, and the rhythm quickens as the deadline closes in, though the strands never resolve into one plot.
Payoff: The stories cross without anyone's actions changing the outcome, so watching becomes less about suspense and more about what people choose to do.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the sky. It never darkens, so only the people ever tell you what time it is.