The Last Halloween
2013 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Marc Roussel
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, whimsical
Four young trick-or-treaters set out on a door-to-door adventure through a devastated, post-apocalyptic city, collecting strange treats as they go.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Halloween through the lens of societal collapse—it's the kind of premise that sounds ridiculous until you realize it's darkly perfect, a subversion of both the holiday-movie formula and the post-apocalyptic slog that makes everyone else exhausted just thinking about it.
Roussel situates this playfully within a lineage of children's-eye-view narratives and apocalyptic cinema, but the tonal balance—whimsy against devastation—feels slightly undecided, as if the film is still negotiating which tradition it wants to inherit.
The decision to keep the trick-or-treating ritual intact and earnest amid the ruins is what lifts this; it's a small, specific choice about what children refuse to surrender, and it does more thematic work than a ten-minute runtime should allow.