IFFR REVIEW DAILY

One Last Evening

VERDICT: A couple’s farewell dinner in Hanover descends into chaos in this pandemic-era portrait, with a political sting in its tail, of an anxious, divided generation.

Carmen Gray, January 26, 2023

It’s the final night for a young couple in their Hanover apartment. Their belongings are packed in boxes, ready for their move to Berlin, and they’ve planned a farewell dinner party despite the pandemic. This also marks a deeper turning point, as they must decide whether to call time on their floundering relationship, or commit to a new beginning. Amid a disastrous string of preparation mishaps, the guests arrive. It initially seems that German director Lukas Nathrath’s feature debut One Last Evening, screening in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, will be a somewhat bland and generic romantic drama and comedy of errors. But as unexpected visitors enter the mix, the wafer-thin veneer of politeness collapses, and the film takes on a spikier, politically charged turn. The chaos that ensues serves as a microcosm of Germany in its combustible social divisions, in which personal space is more guarded than ever, and any sense of real community has fractured. While it’s not a big reveal that identity clashes have been heightened in Covid times, especially when conveyed in the film’s broad-brush terms, it is refreshing to see a German take on partying youth that digs deeper than the generic Berlin hipness, to show a millennial generation under heavy psychological pressure.

The Berlin relocation is in the cards because Lisa (Pauline Werner) has a role lined up at a leading university hospital, where she is to become a neurologist. While she is a driven achiever, her partner Clemens (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer) is the more sensitive and artistic of the two. A musician with one minor local hit, he’s been struggling with a crisis of self-confidence and feelings of inadequacy since a stint in a psychiatric facility, and has a pattern of self-harming.

https://thefilmverdict.com/one-last-evening/