Counting Down The Fourteen Best Films Of 2014
In this totally subjective game of lists, there can only be one winner.
#6: These Final Hours, dir. Zak Hilditch
I spent most of 2014 in an existential panic during which I binge-watched The Walking Dead and fretted about possible apocalypses. I found These Final Hours deeply confronting because of the detailed, quotidian way it explores how people in suburban Perth might deal with their inevitable annihilation. Director Zak Hilditch is unflinching in his depictions – often glimpsed or suggested rather than shown – of nihilism, cruelty and desperation.
These Final Hours evokes Australia’s sunbaked dystopian film tradition (also seen onscreen this year in David Michôd’s The Rover, which succumbed, risibly, to sentimentality). More importantly, it also suggests that the ugly aspects of Australian culture are as searing as death by meteor. But it’s also a hopeful film that argues it’s never too late to become a person of substance. Nathan Phillips is excellent as the protagonist James, who believably abandons being a selfish party bogan to take on responsibility and care for others.