{"id":689257,"date":"2026-06-07T05:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T05:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/689257\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T05:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T05:32:09","slug":"the-last-day-review-alicia-vikander-starring-mrs-dalloway-take","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/689257\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Last Day’ Review: Alicia Vikander-Starring ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ Take"},"content":{"rendered":"

During summers in small towns across America, air sirens will periodically ring out to signal all manner of things. In Mount Kisco, New York<\/a>, they are used \u2014 still \u2014 to call for members of the town\u2019s volunteer fire brigade. Piercing, unpredictable, wailing, the sirens could make anyone feel a little out of their mind. And if you\u2019re already on edge when they go off? Well, good luck.<\/p>\n

In Rachel Rose\u2019s feature directorial debut<\/a>, \u201cThe Last Day<\/a>,\u201d those sirens serve as one of many punctuating \u2014 and, occasionally, quite conspicuous \u2014 elements to keep its characters and audience destabilized. There\u2019s also a dead doe, her anxious fawn, frequent fireworks, plenty of flashbacks, and at least one ill-advised ketamine trip. But these bits, showy as they tend to be, cannot overshadow the film<\/a>\u2018s true strength: graceful performances from stars Alicia Vikander<\/a> and Victoria Pedretti<\/a>. The steady anxiety that they stir up is far more impactful than those other flourishes.<\/p>\n

\"James<\/a> \"TUNER,<\/a> <\/p>\n

Billed as a modern interpretation of Virginia Woolf\u2019s \u201cMrs. Dalloway,\u201d visual-artist-turned-filmmaker Rose offers a bit more restraint when it comes to her screenplay. All the big hallmarks of Woolf\u2019s novel are there \u2014 the disaffected housewife, the unstable stranger, a single day given over to all kinds of errands, blasts from the pasts \u2014 but Rose\u2019s script isn\u2019t at all fussy when it comes to going one to one with her adaptation. She\u2019s taken what she needs, ignored the rest, and turned it into a staggeringly smart new spin on classic material. <\/p>\n

At the center is Vikander\u2019s steady Julia (\u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d fans, that\u2019s your Clarissa), a suburban housewife attempting to navigate a very busy Fourth of July. She\u2019s got a traveling husband, a growing daughter, and a huge house outside of New York City. She\u2019s throwing a big holiday party that night, but before all that, one-time novelist Julia has to head into the city to tick through a lengthy to-do list. Cinematographer Eric Yue stays close on his subjects, a handheld camera keeping us caught in their movements, queasy and intimate in equal measure. <\/p>\n

Julia\u2019s day is already fraught (in the middle of all of this, she\u2019s also dealing with a deep grief over her recently deceased father), but things only get more complicated as she, phew, handles last-minute Botox, a run-in with the perhaps great love of her life (Wagner Moura<\/a>), an entirely horrific professional meeting, and a visit to her dad\u2019s old loft. There\u2019s a stop for group therapy. There are flashbacks that help further illuminate her past life. There\u2019s a growing unease as Julia attempts to balance her everyday concerns with deep-seated fears about who she is as a woman, an artist, a wife, a mother, and a person.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, fellow young suburban mother Taylor (Pedretti) is facing similar problems, simply trying to get through the day while unable to shake profound fears about her very existence. We first meet Taylor in a local bakery as she\u2019s fumbling to pay for some cookies (she\u2019s so out of it that it doesn\u2019t even occur to her to wonder about the whereabouts of her wallet). <\/p>\n

Julia is there too, but the women don\u2019t really cross paths until Julia finds Taylor\u2019s wallet in the parking lot, another to-do added to her list. She can\u2019t possibly know what\u2019s really happening with the young mother, who punches an address to a psychiatric hospital into her GPS, before zooming out of the parking lot and in the other direction. (The GPS continues to advise her to make a U-turn. She will not.)<\/p>\n

When Julia looks Taylor up on the internet, the picture it paints of her \u2014 healthy, smiling photos \u2014 is totally at odds with what we\u2019ve seen of her. And when Taylor finally meets Julia in person, it\u2019s clear she\u2019s admiring of this woman who seems to have it all together. That neither woman is able to see how closely they are linked, how intertwined their worries are, is one of the great heartbreaks of a film filled with them. <\/p>\n

As Taylor heads home to her concerned husband and three young kids (three is a lot, her pediatrician concedes to her during a nerve-jangling visit later in the day), she continues to fray. Flashbacks to her own pre-kid life pull us further in \u2014 she used to be a delivery nurse of all things \u2014 and Pedretti\u2019s joy and vibrance during these sequences only further highlight how utterly heartbreaking the rest of her performance is. Julia may be struggling to reconcile who she wants to be with who she is, but Taylor has long ago lost any sense of her self.<\/p>\n

As Rose\u2019s film follows the pair throughout the day, \u201cThe Last Day\u201d continues to cleverly use the \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d framework to interrogate questions about modern womanhood (those familiar with the novel will, hopefully, spark to the smart ways Rose\u2019s script interprets Taylor in particular). How can Julia and Taylor exist beyond motherhood? Why is it so hard to connect with other women? What does the future look like? What does the past? And why can\u2019t they be happy with what they have? <\/p>\n

Vikander approaches these themes with a steady presence, much of her performance just registering across her face (this is a compliment, a scene in which she grapples with professional disappointment and resentment works because we see how hard she\u2019s struggling to hold it together), while Pedretti leans more into a turn that\u2019s so open that it feels almost too intimate to observe. I can\u2019t recall a recent film during which I so desperately wanted to reach in and hug a character. <\/p>\n

But, of course, I could not do that. I could recognize the need and the pain and the fear of the women who populate it, but I could not touch it, or change it. I could hear it and feel it. But I could only observe it.<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Last Day\u201d premiered at the 2026 Tribeca<\/a> Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. <\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best reviews, streaming picks, and offers some new musings, all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During summers in small towns across America, air sirens will periodically ring out to signal all manner of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":689258,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[64738,88,11337,2695,206,299306,900,215995,28401,244540,121903],"class_list":["post-689257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alicia-vikander","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-rachel-rose","tag-reviews","tag-the-last-day","tag-tribeca","tag-victoria-pedretti","tag-wagner-moura"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/689258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}