{"id":726010,"date":"2026-06-09T21:25:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T21:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/726010\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T21:25:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T21:25:18","slug":"the-last-day-review-alicia-vikander-is-another-modern-mrs-dalloway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/726010\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Last Day’ Review: Alicia Vikander Is Another Modern Mrs. Dalloway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s the Fourth of July in \u201cThe Last Day,\u201d and the weather is playing ball: the kind of soft, slouchy summer heat made for a leafy garden party. But a chill runs through Rachel Rose<\/a>\u2018s elegantly restrained, internalized character study. It crisps the edges of the film\u2019s immaculately lit frames and causing its two principal characters, tautly played by Alicia Vikander<\/a> and Victoria Pedretti<\/a>, to stiffen slightly, unable to give themselves over to the day\u2019s balmy mood. Both are mothers, and holiday or not, there\u2019s much to be done: caterers to organize, groceries to buy, pediatrician appointments to keep, meds to take. But Rose\u2019s film isn\u2019t a standard portrait of domestic discontent, grasping instead at something harder and less tangible to articulate: the sense that you\u2019ve slid out of step with your own life.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Last Day\u201d is the second adaptation of Virginia Woolf\u2019s \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d to premiere in as many months, though Rose\u2019s riff is even looser than Chuko and Arie Esiri\u2019s excellent, Lagos-set \u201cClarissa,\u201d which just bowed at Cannes. The films are sufficiently different in concept and narrative direction that their shared source material shouldn\u2019t pose a commercial impediment to either: It\u2019s merely a testament to the philosophical precision and complex feminism of Woolf\u2019s 1925 novel that it has inspired two persuasive contemporary interpretations over a century later. (A third Woolf adaptation, the Haley Bennett-starring \u201cNight and Day,\u201d premiered earlier this month at SXSW London; perhaps a full revival is in swing.) With its polished craft and finely controlled lead performances \u2014 with Vikander in one of her strongest vehicles since her Oscar win a decade ago \u2014 this Tribeca premiere should secure select arthouse distribution.<\/p>\n

\n\tRose is a visual artist known for her sensorially-led video installations examining the human condition and its relationship to the natural world. Though it takes a more conventional narrative form, \u201cThe Last Day\u201d is consistent with that work in style and scope, beginning with its entrancing opening shots of a mother doe and her fawn in the woodlands of upstate New York \u2014 at peace in an environment of verdant, whispering bliss, before being violently connected to our realm. Eric K. Yue\u2019s lush cinematography is sharply attuned to light and texture \u2014 the streaks of sun on an animal\u2019s fur, blind spots of deep green shadow in the forest \u2014 while equally exacting sound design isolates and distorts what is natural and ambient, making it uncanny.<\/p>\n

\n\tYards away, Julia (Vikander) leaves her imposing colonial house to begin a day of errands and appointments, ahead of the large Fourth of July gathering that she and her husband throw annually. There are macarons to be collected and botox to be touched up; there\u2019s also a dreaded meeting in the city with a literary agent (Marin Ireland), pressing for a follow-up to the popular book that Julia published a decade ago. What Julia is loath to tell her is that she hasn\u2019t written a word in years, with marriage and motherhood having largely, not entirely happily, consumed her time of late, alongside the recent death of her father. <\/p>\n

\n\tToday, the party gives her a clear purpose and objective, a semblance of a life in order. Zoom out a bit, however, and she\u2019s clearly but quietly adrift. The pretense is hard to maintain when she bumps by chance into an ex, fellow writer Peter (a brief, melancholic turn by Wagner Moura<\/a>), with whom she\u2019s never quite made her peace. And it\u2019s only in her scene with Peter that Vikander\u2019s brittly serene performance \u2014 all tellingly tight smiles and effortfully tamped-down reactions \u2014 is permitted, briefly and tantalizingly, to flare into anger.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a parking lot, she picks up a wallet accidentally dropped by a stranger, finds an address inside, and add returning it to her to-do list. The wallet\u2019s owner, Taylor (Pedretti), doesn\u2019t even notice it\u2019s missing, between the various stresses of her day and the demands of her two young children. Even before a scene with a doctor that spells it out, Pedretti\u2019s performance \u2014 at once raw-nerved and a million miles away \u2014 makes clear the disoriented, hollowed-out effects of postpartum depression, and her frustration at being gently managed by those around her, without being altogether understood. And so her day unfolds, like Julia\u2019s, in an outwardly uneventful fashion that nonetheless points to a personal breaking point, all the more alarming for having no set timer on it: The fire-station test sirens that increasingly slice through the soundtrack strike an eerie, baleful note.<\/p>\n

\n\tSome viewers may be frustrated at the lack of narrative fireworks here, even as the film climaxes with an ironic, feverishly edited display of Independence Day pyrotechnics. The two women\u2019s arcs collide only glancingly, and there\u2019s no sense of either joint or individual catharsis on offer as the story ends, if anything, more elusively than it began. But that air of unsettled, unidentified tension is crucial to Rose\u2019s study of lives in passive crisis, nominally holding things together while fading away on the inside. Some fortunate people may leave \u201cThe Last Day\u201d feeling that nothing much happened in it at all; others will be raddled, like Julia and Taylor, with searing feelings they can\u2019t or won\u2019t name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the Fourth of July in \u201cThe Last Day,\u201d and the weather is playing ball: the kind of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":726011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6628,49,48,75,337,260488,259966,171467,163892],"class_list":["post-726010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alicia-vikander","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-rachel-rose","tag-tribeca-film-festival","tag-victoria-pedretti","tag-wagner-moura"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/726011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}