These Final Hours is an incredibly bleak yet never the less effective pre-apocalypse movie, that stunningly portrays an Australia succumbed to a culture of death during the most fleeting and precious moments of creation.

Make no mistake with this apocalypse movie: The end is coming. There will be no miracle from the heavens, no superhero swooping in for the save, and no scientific invention to stop a tsunami of fire consuming the world after a meteorite crashes into the Earth, bringing with it death at its most finite.

These Final Hours – the feature film debut from writer/director Zak Hilditch – simply asks the question: What would you do on your last day on Earth? For self-absorbed two-timer James (Nathan Phillips) the answer is to leave behind his pregnant lover (Jessica De Gouw) and head for the party to end all parties, where he will join his girlfriend (Kathryn Beck) and welcome the end of the world in a drugged out stupor.

Proving that life can still throw curveballs (even during its final breathes), James is faced with a moral dilemma that leads him to save 11 year old girl Rose (Angourie Rice) from two attackers with very bad intentions. Afterwards he reluctantly agrees to reunite Rosie with her family, in the process growing a conscience that reminds him that the preservation of life still matters even when death is hours away.

The Perth suburbs setting in These Final Hours brings with it a very tangible quality, a raw intimacy of seeing the home base stripped of its safe veneer and play backdrop to not only cataclysmic events of the colossal, but also of the very grounded and horrific, as the populace of Perth turns lawless and desperate, caving in to its most animalistic and selfish of instincts with murder, suicide of mass proportions, and sex at its most hollow the final acts of many. Such are the results of a culture where the easy fix of death as “merciful” and “me-first” selfishness, trumps the fact that life is meant to be lived no matter how much of it is left.

Whether Hilditch intended These Final Hours to come across that way is anyone’s guess, but it is certainly a strong moral lesson learned by his protagonist James, a muscular and tattooed blokes-bloke whose look and style screams Aussie soap-star reject, yet as portrayed by Nathan Phillips (known by many as the man who got away in Wolf Creek) becomes a very sympathetic character of tortured angst and stirring emotion.     

At times These Final Hours can be too much. Hilditch’s constant focus on death (with portrayals of one suicide, after a murder, after another suicide…) as the means to this end can get very bleak, very fast. Needed were examples of the opposite. Where are those families in embrace? Where are those people in prayer? Where are those sharing a final meal?

Yet as a mixture of heavy drama, apocalypse movie genre conventions, and strong moral commentary, These Final Hours makes for a haunting -albeit bleak- watch, and a strong start to Zak Hilditch’s sure to be eventful career.