The Last Anniversary: A Demon-possessed, Apocalyptic Big Chill on a Budget
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Some years back, indie filmmaker Ingrid Veninger paid forward a $5,000 award she received from the Toronto Film Critics Association to fund five films by young colleagues.
That’s a tight budgeting challenge, even by Canadian standards.
Brothers/co-directors Brett and Jason Butler used the money in an effectively minimalist way, with 2013’s Mourning Has Broken, a mordant comedy about a man who wakes up to find his ailing wife dead beside him, and spends the day in denial.
When the scariest thing in the mirror isn’t you.
A dozen years later, the Butler brothers’ dark impulses are still on display – as is their ability to maximize a buck – with the claustrophobic The Last Anniversary, opening this week. Kind of a demon-possessed The Big Chill if that movie were set against an impending apocalypse, The Last Anniversary is smartly written, delivering its Twilight Zone-esque details in dribs and drabs.
It also squeezes everything it can out of essentially its only set – an abandoned motel that looks like a snow-covered Motel 6 on the outside, and spacious and well equipped inside, hallways shot as if inspired by the interiors of The Shining.
The movie opens with Aubrey (Jesse McQueen) and Tom (Kenneth Northfield) arriving at the inn, the scene of their wedding some 10 years earlier. It is everybody’s last day on Earth, but nobody talks about it much. Whatever is happening, the proprietors and usual clientele obviously left in a hurry. The bar is well-stocked (soon to be drained by guests), the pool looks like it’s recently been cleaned, as are the rooms. There’s a sauna and even a squash court.
Soon the old friends show up for their reunion and a mess of grievances (and a few sexual obsessions) to settle before, well, you know. Nobody talks about that much. Maybe they’re tired of talking about it.
The groups includes a hot mess of a drug-addicted party girl, the semi-successful singer-songwriter she’s got the hots for, a New Agey pal with severe male inadequacy issues, a cop with a reflexive “take charge” vibe, and a couple who’ll use any excuse to get away from their kids (even on the day of the end of the world).
They’re all there except for Brenda (Jenna Vittoria) the maid of honour who went missing on Aubrey and Tom’s wedding night, and was never seen again. Outwardly, it was all dismissed as the actions of a flake. But a demonic ghost girl who looks like she escaped from an Evil Dead movie keeps showing up, trying to kill our happy hotel guests one-by-one.
Hmm. Who could she be?
There are some internal logic issues in the script, and the actors are fine, just not the first thing you think of when you consider what it is that reaches out and grabs you about The Last Anniversary (the demon girl aside). It’s the story, and the Butler brothers’ clever use of minimal resources to create a mood. There’s psychopathy behind the characters’ motivations, and the urge to create something audacious seems to trump all else.
Take away the stylishness of their filmic exercise, and The Last Anniversary would be a clunky play about a shared secret.
The Last Anniversary. Directed by Brett and Jason Butler. Stars Kenneth Northfield, Jesse McQueen and Jenna Vittoria. The Last Anniversary opens in Toronto, May 22-28 at Imagine Cinemas Carlton, Sudbury May 29 at Imagine Cinemas Sudbury and in Vancouver, June 10 at the Rio Theatre.