Last and First Men · reception & legacy
2020 · Jóhann Jóhannsson
How Last and First Men has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It premiered at the 2020 Berlinale two years after Jóhannsson's death, received as a haunting posthumous farewell more than reviewed as a movie; since then it's quietly hardened into a small ambient-cinema cult, the kind of film people revisit like a piece of music.
What's debated
The perennial fight: transcendent requiem or a gorgeous concert visual stretched to feature length — 'is this actually a film?' shows up in half its reviews.
Its footprint
It became a gateway drug to the spomeniks — Yugoslavia's brutalist WWII monuments — turning them into instant cinephile iconography, with Tilda Swinton's voice-of-the-far-future narration setting the tone for a thousand 'transmission from two billion years hence' descriptions.
Where it stands
A cult one-off: the only feature ever directed by the composer of Sicario and Arrival, treasured by score-heads and slow-cinema devotees as his accidental last testament.