A Last Resort
2022 · 17m · UK
Directed by Leanne Davis
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tender
Wannabe movie star Rose desperately wants to celebrate her 60th birthday like it's 1999 at a faded seaside hotel, while her uptight daughter Genevieve struggles to ignore recent tragic revelations about her mother's health. A tragicomedy about a mother-daughter love story set against the backdrop of terminal illness.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a precious indie dramedy about dying parents and dutiful daughters—Davis flips it by making the mother the alive one, the daughter the ghost haunted by medical facts, which is refreshingly perverse but doesn't quite explode the genre the way it thinks it does.
Davis situates herself thoughtfully in the lineage of intimate family portraiture—there's Reichardt's patience, maybe some Ducournau's bodily specificity—but the tonal balance between boozy farce and dementia dread never quite achieves the formal inevitability that would make this linger.
The decision to anchor the whole film on Genevieve's involuntary smile during the party—that single moment where she can't help but love her mother even as the diagnosis sits between them—is the hinge that makes the rest of the sentiment earned rather than manipulative.
Festivals
- Sunderland Shorts Film Festival 2022
- Flatpack Festival 2022
- Women X Festival 2022
- Beeston Film Festival 2023
- North East International Film Festival 2023
- Royal Television Society NE&B Awards 2024, Best Short Film nomination