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Verdict: A lovely, offbeat look at the end of the world.

Details: Starring Sandra Oh, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie and Sarah Polley. Rated R for sexuality, profanity and brief violence. 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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Review: When a young man says "au revoir" to his high school French teacher (Genevieve Bujold), she corrects him with the more final "adieu." That's because the first farewell implies that they'll meet again sometime, which is simply not an option in the aptly named drama "Last Night."

The end of the world has inspired Hollywood filmmakers to send casts of thousands screaming through the streets and to flatten New York and Paris with special effects. For our neighbors to the north — or at least Canadian writer-director-actor Don McKellar — the final apocalypse is treated with a dry wit and a sense of decorum that consciously tweaks that nation's reputation for civility.

"It's a test of our values," says one older man, presiding over a mock Christmas dinner on the eve of The End. His wife has gift-wrapped childhood toys to redistribute to their grown children, Jennifer (Sarah Polley) and Patrick (McKellar), and elder relatives have joined them for a feast. But while the rest of his family bonds over home movies, Patrick insists on going back to his flat to be alone during the hours remaining till midnight, when Earth goes bye-bye.

The root of Patrick's antisocial mood is one of several mysteries gradually revealed in the movie, which interweaves the stories of a handful of friends and strangers. They include Patrick's pal Craig (Callum Keith Rennie), busy at his apartment fulfilling his every sexual fantasy with a revolving roster of women; Duncan (fellow Canadian director David Cronenberg), a gas company executive who leaves messages for customers, assuring that their service will be uninterrupted until the very end; and, most memorably, Sandra (Sandra Oh), whose attempts to make it home to her husband are constantly thwarted.

McKellar has them crossing paths in an odd urban landscape. It's a ghost-town Toronto full of memorably desolate images, such as a girl and her mother (director Atom Egoyan's muse-wife, Arsinee Khanjian) sitting dazed on an abandoned bus, or Sandra's car, picked up by a mob and left leaning upright against a lamppost. The look of the movie matches its tone: amusing but bittersweet. An occasional mob appears, stirring up chaos, but even at their most aggressive, they're less threatening than a bunch of American partyers wheeling from a late-night binge.

Co-writer with Francois Girard of "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" and "The Red Violin," McKellar's solo work here is an accomplished balance between deadpan humor and repressed emotion. It's typical of the movie's sideways approach that we never learn the nature of the coming cataclysm, or the reason why the sun never sets, even as the clock ticks close to midnight.

The movie's antic but high-stakes tone is summed up in this exchange: One character says to another, "I want you to shoot me." The flummoxed fellow replies, "I hardly know you."

In the strong ensemble cast, McKellar uses his quietly comical aloofness to good effect. But the film's standout is Oh, whose urgent presence gives it its emotional core, providing the unexpected wallop of the final scene. Simple on the surface, but cutting deep, "Last Night" succeeds in making you wonder what you'd do if you knew your remaining time could be measured on the clock. For all its wry humor, it concludes as a heart-piercing affirmation of life and love in the face of death.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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