Crew
Director – Amadeusz Kocan, Screenplay/Producers/Photography – Amadeusz Kocan & Bartosz Wabno, Music – Alan Bucki, Visual Effects – Bartosz Wabno. Production Company – X Best Cinema.
Cast
Damian Ziembinski (Michal Szewczenko), Karol Kopiec (Gari), Grzegorz Halama (Sroka), Pawel Kaszkowiak (Pietrucha), Dariusz Walus (Stawros), Jaroslaw Jaros (Herman), Abelard Giza (Mataj), Michal Golkowski (Misza), Tomasz Zegzula (Stalker)
Plot
Following the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, a thirty-kilometre exclusion zone has been established around the town of Pripyat. In 2006, a mysterious flash of light occurred, killing all personnel inside the zone. Afterwards, strange phenomena have been experienced around the zone, including shifting terrain, strange anomalies and deadly traps that can kill people. Michal hires a stalker to take him into the zone in search of his brother Hektor who went missing as part of a military detachment. The stalker prepares to abandon Michal there but is disintegrated by phenomena. Michal is found and taken on by a group of other stalkers. He learns that Hektor is alive but is ill after being affected. The only hope to save Hektor is to retrieve one of the mysterious artefacts that is reputed to be able to heal.
The Last Loner was a feature film debut for Polish director Amadeusz Kocan. Prior to this, Kocan had made a series of documentaries between eleven and ninety minutes in length under the umbrella title The Last People of Chernobyl, which travel inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to profile the people still living there.
The Last Loner has been made as a homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Stalker took place in a mysterious area known as The Zone that had been affected by a mysterious event, possibly extraterrestrial in origin, that had left the terrain prone to warps and deadly traps. Guides known as Stalkers took curiosity seekers into the area. At the heart of The Zone was The Room where one could have their hearts’ desire granted when entered.
In 1986, several years after Stalker came out, there was the nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The radioactively affected area was placed under a 30km exclusion zone. In a case of life parallelling fiction, there emerged a group of guides who would take people into the zone and these were given the names of stalkers. Turning full circle, The Last Loner is a homage to Stalker but this time is actually set inside the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone and features stalkers as characters.
Now there are quite significant differences between Stalker and The Last Loner. In Stalker, everything was mysterious – we saw almost nothing in the way of the fantastical, the anomalies and traps were only talked about; by contrast, The Last Loner gives us digital effects of warps opening up and the landscape being affected, even one full scale effect of a bridge disintegrating and of one of the stalkers falling into a trap and being fragmented. In keeping with Stalker, there is no explanation of what occurred – just some anomalous energy that killed everyone in the zone – and potential extraterrestrial explanations are left unmentioned.
The film also goes back to something of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972), the novel on which Stalker is based, and includes details that were dropped by Tarkovsky when it came to the film – having multiple stalkers in the Zone and their hunting after artifacts that have some value for their alien properties, as well as depictions of anomalies such as gravity traps and showing the stalkers testing for them, or of people mutated and physically affected after exposure.
The Last Loner sits on the edge of being almost interesting. Like all films about mysterious phenomena, it creates a mystery that aches to be solved. However, it never pulls this together (or even leaves it unanswered) in an interesting way. And then the film arrives at a very abrupt ending only 70 minutes in as though the budget had run out. It makes no sense to suddenly end the film at that point. The title in both Polish and English is The Last Loner, a phrase that makes it sound like an action film but has no actual relevance anywhere in the film.
Trailer here