One Hundred Mornings (2009)

directed by Conor Horgan
Ireland
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Movies about the end of the world! Good! Romance movies set during the end of the world! Less good. There seems to be a lot of movies that use the apocalypse as a backdrop for romance and I could probably go on at length about why that is, what the promise of eventual destruction adds to a romantic plotline, but at the moment I'm not going to. It is an interesting trend though.

With hundreds if not thousands of other end-of-days movies out there, the question for One Hundred Mornings is: Is this apocalypse interesting? As it turns out, it's not; not by any stretch of the imagination, but that's just fine. The apocalypse in this film is a slow, boring, quiet, monotonous end-times that's less of a total cataclysmic end of the world scenario than a sort of slow dismantling of society as seen through the eyes of four people who decided to pack up and get away from it all. No bombs, no natural disasters, nothing of the sort- just humanity eating itself alive from the inside out.

The romantic bits don't actually get too annoying at any point because mostly there's too much arguing for it to focus on being a tender and mushy romance or anything like that. It's less about being in a relationship during the end of days and more about simply being human during them. After you've packed up your friends and found a place to wait out the chaos, there's still the question of what you're going to do with your more human problems; things that don't involve oil or food shortages but rather the pervasiveness of human emotions even when the world around you is totally falling apart. No amount of societal upheaval is going to be able to stop somebody from cheating if their mind is set to it, nor will it take away the pain that inflicts upon the person being cheated on.

Unfortunately I feel like the movie went a little too subtle with its end-of-days. The struggle to find food and survive without electricity would have felt more realistic had we actually gotten a window into what was going on in the outside world. All we see is a dingy-looking Wicklow, dirty and full of trash. I get the vibe that the budget of this thing was not cushy enough to accommodate many actors to populate its post-breakdown city and as such it had to make do with the absence of people rather than the overabundance of them. It is somewhat intriguing the way the total lack of people is contrasted with the dilapidated state of the town- it's like everyone trashed things and then disappeared, and it's one of the only parts of the movie that really up-front screams "Hey, the world's ended here".

This is also one of those movies where nature is totally indifferent to the plight of humanity and it's absolutely beautiful for it. We don't get overindulgent shots of rolling hills and open fields but we do get a very atmospheric environment surrounding the cabin in which the four main characters take up shelter. The feeling of the natural world finally proving itself to be superior than humanity after humanity goes ahead and wrecks itself is constant and palpable. Having such gorgeous scenery and such a raw, woodsy color palette pretty much makes up for the lack of action.