‘If You Were The Last’ Review: Kristian Mercado’s Lo-fi Romcom Gets Lost In Space – SXSW
deadline.comThere are lots of ways to pitch If You Were the Last. How about “Michel Gondry remakes When Harry Met Sally — in space!” Who wouldn’t want to see that?
But for all the ingenious hot takes one can dream up for Kristian Mercado’s ambitious feature-length debut, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s less than the sum of its parts.
To be brutal, although it does, for an hour at least, cast a spell, raise interesting metaphysical questions, and center on an odd couple who, for once, actually don’t seem like they’ll get together and then totally convince us when they do — it doesn’t really pass muster as a movie at all.
Which is surprising, because character-based, low-budget sci-fi indies set in the howling existential wilderness of deep space do have a history of working against the odds, like John Carpenter’s blackly comic Dark Star and Douglas Trumbull’s still slightly bonkers eco-themed Silent Running, which, here, is the more representative of the two.
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