"If there's nobody to see it, I'll watch it," said Abel Ferrara eighteen months ago, as he prepared to embark on his latest film. As it turns out, 4:44 Last Day On Earth is his highest-profile release in some years. There's even a trailer!
Taking place in New York, the film follows Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh (Mrs Ferrara) as Cisko and Skye, a couple greeting an incoming armageddon by arguing and having sex. Cisko then leaves their apartment for a heroin-fuelled nighttime odyssey, before the deadline of 4:44am, after which, it's all over. As a newscaster calmly states at the start of the clip, "It doesn't matter where you live or how much money you have; we're all about to face the same fate at the same moment."
This being Ferrara, we're on an ultra-low budget, but it's amazing what you can do with stock footage. The trailer takes us around Manhattan, and to Easter Island, India, and Vatican City, and there are clips of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. It's all anchored around the craggy visage of Dafoe, who made Manderlay and Antichrist with Lars Von Trier, but wasn't part of Melancholia. It seems he opted for an apocalypse elsewhere. He worked with Ferrara previously, on the 1998 adaptation of William Gibson's short story New Rose Hotel.
And that's frequent Ferrara collaborator Francis Kuipers on the soundtrack, by the way, though you may think it's Tom Waits.
4:44 Last Day On Earth boasts some enthusiastic film press endorsements, and was officially selected for the Venice and New York film festivals. Empire**'s Damon Wise caught it in Venice and wasn't overly impressed. Still, as one character has it, "It's the end of the world, the end of the dream. We wanna see it!" It gets a limited release in the US on March 23, but we don't have a date in the UK yet.