One Last Night (Anthony Sabet, 2018) USA/ France

Reviewed by Keyu Zhu. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018

One Last Night is Anthony Sabet’s first long feature movie. Also, he is a writer, producer and director of his new movie.The movie talks about Alex and Zoe goes out to watch a movie for a date but the movie was locked, so they tried to find a way out, which is like an escape room. However, the truth is Alex already know that the theater is going to be locked but he doesn’t tell Zoe because he wants to do an experiment about this new dating adventure. When Zoe realized the truth, she is so mad and leaves him even if she likes him. With the help of his co-worker Taryn, he restarts a relationship with Zoe and they tried to explore the new dating adventure by designing all the theatre and all the games. Zoe used to be an escape room designer so they finally design an amazing adventure.

This is a relaxing and romantic movies, it really impress me a lot with the topic—the escape room and online dating. With the development of technology, it just becomes more and more common, the idea of this movie is amazing and I really appreciate that the director got his own idea so the movie looks really cool. The most funny scene of this film festival ever is when the security plays with his taser gun in the security room, it was just used in a lot of films but still made me laugh. The actor Brian Baumgartner is really professional because he seems know everything about acting and making people laugh, he did a really good job.

The narrative of this movie is great, there is not a lot of intense turning point of the plot, all the story just goes very smoothly and neatly. The distinctive style for this movie is that the music composer really knows when and where to put the background music, the music is really catchy and there are a lot of emotion and words within the music. There are couple English songs and French songs, there are very attached to the movie and well connected. The director said the movie is a little relate to other movie called 500 Days with Summer and I am able to see couple details alike such as how their relationship goes and how the story sets. They both are very relaxing and catchy movies.

I think this is a very successful movie especially for the director who just start his first long feature movie, I can see there are a lot of efforts behind the scene and the story is very complete and touching. I was very impressed by this film in the movie festival. It definitely provides film learner and audience a way different perspective and insights to make love story into a mature movie. It is the movie that worth watching it twice because it helps you to learn how to make a movie and how to tell a story.