Director – Samuel Gay, Screenplay – Samuel Gay & Stewart Klein, Producers – Tait Brady, Raquelle David & Samuel Gay, Photography – Simon Chapman & Jason Hargreaves, Music – Helen Grimley, Visual Effects – Ben Ying, Production Design – Karen Smith. Production Company – Pirate Dog Productions/The Acme Film Company/Goliath.
Kerith Atkinson (Alex), Tony Brockman (John), Jacki Mison (Wendy), Sarah Kennedy (Jen), Christopher Sommers (Ken)
In Brisbane, Alex goes to a dinner party put on by her friends Jen and Ken who try to set her up with John. However, Alex finds John’s nerdiness a turnoff and leaves stating she would never date him “if he were the last man in the world.” She wakes up in the morning to find the city deserted. After wandering, she encounters none other than John. John has a theory about the disappearance of people having been triggered by a quantum event. The two connect and begin to develop a liking until they encounter a third person Wendy. Alex becomes jealous when she thinks that John is more interested in Wendy, who has similar nerdy interests to him. Wendy has a theory about how to return things to normal, but this involves triggering a secret US defence base to fire nuclear missiles on the city.
In sitting down to watch A Guide to Dating at the End of the World, I was expecting a variation on Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012). Instead however, the film falls into a mini-genre of deserted Earth or Last People on Earth dramas. This began with nuclear war films of the 1950s such as Five (1951) and The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1958) – Kerith Atkinson is even seen watching the Roger Corman film The Last Woman on Earth (1960) on tv at one point. The work that has had the greatest influence on modern films in this niche, including A Guide to Dating at the End of the World, is The Quiet Earth (1985) in which Bruno Lawrence wakes up to find himself in an entirely deserted world before encountering two others. Other modern variants have included Vanishing on 7th Street (2010), The Midnight After (2014), Alone (2017) and Bokeh (2017).
A Guide to Dating at the End of the World follows the tropes and plot lines of these other deserted world films. Kerith Atkinson wakes up in the morning and finds that everybody in the world has vanished. (Although this does mean that the power grid is and isn’t still on at various points). Here the scenario has been construed as a Romantic Comedy take on The Quiet Earth. The plot where a man and woman meet in the ruins and love blossoms that we had in The Quiet Earth is now rewritten where the other person that Kerith Atkinson encounters is the very man (Tony Brockman) she met at the start of the film and said she wouldn’t go out with if he was the last person in the world.
The Quiet Earth had the only people left alive being those who died at the moment the switchover occurred. In the most absurd take, this has only people left being those who had an orgasm at the moment the switchover occurred – yes, the two principals end up in the deserted alternate reality because they were both simultaneously masturbating at the key moment! The film also them switch back at the end by having sex together and achieving mutual orgasm at the very instant that they are obliterated by nuclear missiles.
A Guide to Dating at the End of the World is a film that pushes wild coincidence to bursting point – that Kerith Atkinson wakes up alone in the world and the sole other person she meets just happens to be the guy she said she would never date if he was the last person on Earth; that the one other person they meet (Jacki Mison) also happens to be a perfect match for Tony’s interests; oh and that both Jacki and Tony happen to have expert scientific knowledge, the sort that understands the workings of the Hadron Collider, and the ability to not only fix everything but even hack the US Defence Department (surely the most secure computer system in the world) to fire nuclear missiles on Brisbane.
The film offers a nominal science-fictional explanation for proceedings. It is set on September 10, 2008, the date that the Large Hadron Collider was activated and tries to convince us that, just like The Quiet Earth, this enacted some fundamental change in the laws of physics that transported people to another plane. (A peculiar obsession with the Hadron Collider altering physics has infiltrated through into assorted conspiracy theories in recent years). Tony Brockman spouts a bunch of phrases taken from quantum physics – The God Particle, String Theory, singularities, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge – that add up to a meaningless nonsense word salad. At one point, Kerith Atkinson even tells him “You’re talking gibberish.”
Trailer here