Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
There has been a long fascination with the idea of the end of the world. I’m not specifically talking about the eschatology of Christianity in this case, but more in the literal “the world is going to end” sense, whether through nuclear devastation, climate peril, or disease. There’s a part of us that seems to yearn for the species-wide abyss. Probably my first two encounters with this idea were stories—Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 and Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World. Roshwald’s book is about a man living in the deepest bunker after a nuclear war while Bradbury’s story is more about the world simply switching off. I bring these up because both stories are far more interesting than Silent Night, and that shouldn’t be the case.
This is an “end of the world” story, and unlike the bombastic 2012, the action-oriented Snowpiercer, or the darkly comic Don’t Look Up, this is a film much closer to The Happening, in a sense. Essentially, humanity has dry-humped the planet so badly that the planet is fighting back. A massive noxious poison cloud has begun engulfing the world, and what everyone is getting for Christmas this year is death.
