‘The Last Day’ Review: Alicia Vikander and Victoria Pedretti Shine in a ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ Reinterpretation About the Perils of Modern Motherhood

It often takes a second while watching The Last Day, the feature debut by writer-director Rachel Rose, to make out exactly what it is we’re looking at.

An extreme close-up of fur eventually reveals itself to be a deer. White light bouncing off a slick surface turns out to be the hood of an SUV. A blur of red and white slowly comes into focus as a display of packaged meats.

Until these images resolve themselves, we are lost, out of sync with a world we should know yet can’t quite seem to make sense of — not unlike protagonists Julia (Alicia Vikander) and Taylor (Victoria Pedretti), moms who don’t quite seem at home in their lives either. Loosely inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, The Last Day delivers a take on the perils of modern motherhood that’s most powerful for the precision of its eye and the sensitivity of its performances, even as its storytelling tilts toward cryptic.

The film, which premieres at Tribeca, borrows the basic structure of Virginia Woolf’s classic. (In this, The Last Day is not alone on the festival circuit — Neon’s Cannes premiere Clarissa transposes the action to modern-day Lagos.) In a tony suburb outside New York City, Julia sets out to run some errands ahead of her annual Fourth of July party later that night. At one of her first stops, a bakery, she encounters but does not interact with Taylor, a frazzled mom on her own day of errands.

Julia does pick up the wallet Taylor has dropped in the parking lot, mentally adding “return wallet to address on driver’s license” to her to-do list. But The Last Day is concerned less with this direct intersection of their lives — so glancing it registers as barely a blip to both women — than the ways they compare and contrast on a thematic level. And Rose, known for her video installations, relies more on striking imagery and sound than propulsive storytelling to cast her spell, yielding an experience whose impact is more easily felt than explained.

For Julia, a once-promising writer who hasn’t penned anything since getting married and having a child over a decade earlier, this Independence Day becomes a bridge between the ghosts of her past and the potential of her future.

She has a serendipitous encounter with a novelist ex-boyfriend, Peter (a soulful Wagner Moura), that sours as they return to what we sense are oft-repeated arguments about the choices they’ve made regarding career and family. A meeting with a literary agent, Ellen (Marin Ireland), serves as an uncomfortable reminder of how long it’s been since she even tried to create. A visit to her father’s apartment, now being cleared out to sell, sparks renewed grief over his recent death and bittersweet memories of the mother who abandoned her.

By contrast, Taylor’s day, which takes her and her newborn from the pediatrician’s office to the local library to the grocery store, feels stuck in an unbearable present. We get only the barest hints of her history for much of the film, and no plausible sense of what she envisions for herself. Even the brief flashbacks that cut in during an emotional moment for Taylor belong not to her but to Julia — as if Taylor has become so disconnected from her existence that she has none of her own memories of being a new mother singing her baby to sleep.

What is clear, from the very first moments of Pedretti’s tremendously raw performance, is that this is a woman in crisis. Costume designer April Napier puts Julia in a sweatshirt the color of a fire engine, which, amid upstate New York’s tasteful tree-lined streets, looks almost as jarring as the sirens that occasionally pierce the idyllic soundscape. But Pedretti carries Taylor with the tentative, almost reluctant posture of a woman who’d just as soon disappear into the ether.

When Taylor talks, her words betray a desperate anxiety. But Pedretti is most devastating in all the moments Taylor doesn’t push back: not when her husband gets called away to work in her time of need, not when a security guard demands she re-scan her grocery items, not when her psych tells her she just needs to be patient with her new meds. These people (mostly men) seem to accept her docility as proof she’s doing fine, or at least not doing badly enough to cause any problems. To us, though, it reads in accumulation as the emptiness of a woman who has nothing left at all.

That tendency toward under-reaction, socialized into these women by a society with limited interest in their true feelings, is key as well to Vikander’s precision-tuned performance. When a younger colleague of her husband’s describes her as “a grownup,” or Ellen airily declares her “respect” for stay-at-home moms (“I couldn’t do it!”), Julia keeps her face the perfectly composed picture of social grace. But we can feel the irritation or frustration bubbling just underneath, having gotten to know a less guarded version of her through more private moments.

Still, it’s different for Julia than it is for Taylor. Though Julia may have resigned herself to the stultifying life of an upper-class wife and mother, she has enough fire to bristle when Peter suggests she could have kept writing if she’d wanted to, to squirm with embarrassment when Ellen asks what she’s been working on — and, late in the film, to give herself over to awe as fireworks fill the sky.

Over and over in The Last Day, characters struggle to make sense of their current states. “I’m so fucking startled by where I am,” Julia confesses to Peter. “It’s my fault. We’re trapped and I can’t get them out,” Taylor’s hoarse voiceover goes in the middle of an emotional spiral. Not even the environment around them is immune to this confusion. In the very first scene, a baby deer stares at its mother lying dead on the side of the road, and looks around like it’s trying to piece together what has transpired.

The Last Day has no answers to these implicit questions, or at least not any tidy ones. What it does have is the curiosity to observe its characters’ disillusionment and the empathy to share in their complicated emotions — and the imagination to find the grasp toward transcendence embedded in the mundane.