THESE FINAL HOURS

3.5 out of 5 stars

MA, 87 minutes, opens Thursday

Director: Zak Hilditch

Stars: Nathan Phillips, Angourie Rice, Jessica De Gouw, Daniel Henshall

The world is ending – or at least on the brink of it – once every month at the movies these days, but Zak Hilditch’s tense apocalyptic drama These Final Hours gives a familiar concept a telling new location: Perth.

Sun-drenched and spread out – reminding its residents that there is nowhere to hide – the suburbs of the West Australian capital are the setting for a final day of life, where the planet’s imminent destruction via meteorite strike is a given and everything and everyone is coming to the boil. Signs of murderous violence and wanton destruction dot the streets, but there’s also blank despair and surrender.

Hilditch uses action to define character, and the choice is stark for James (Nathan Phillips), a tattooed twentysomething, from the first scene. Looking to get back to his on-off girlfriend, Zoe (Jessica De Gouw), he witnesses two men dragging a screaming young girl, Rose (Angourie Rice), into their house.

In a way Hilditch’s film suggests that we can’t avoid the reckoning our lives require, even if the planet is burning up from northern hemisphere to south. Notions of right and wrong, guilt and recrimination, remain strong, and the less than perfect James doesn’t turn away from the fearful child, resulting in one of several unusually tense scenes that dot the story.

The redemptive arc of James is obvious but the storyline is clouded by flashbacks and his attempts to fob off Rose when it’s clear she won’t be easily reunited with her family. Phillips has been in all manner of B-movies over the past decade, including Wolf Creek and Snakes on a Plane, but this is a standout performance - regretful, harried and soulfully brittle.

The movie’s centrepiece is an end-of-the-world rave, thrown by the demented Freddy (Daniel Henshall), where death and drugs create a nightmarish landscape that’s particularly Australian, with muscled bros playing Russian roulette punctuating the heaving milieu. The mass of desperate people is a counterpoint to the intimate final scenes, and throughout Hilditch makes clever decisions that alleviate the predictable.

There’s actually more to James’s rapprochement with his mother (Lynette Curran) than Zoe, but the concise These Final Hours is a strong film. It’s the first of several small Australian films, such as September’s The Infinite Man, that present familiar genres with a welcome and unexpected local perspective. If that keeps on happening, Australian filmmaking just might open a few closed minds.