2024 March 18

REVIEW: The Last Year of Darkness

The Last Year of Darkness (2024), dir. Ben Mullinkosson.

I’ve never really liked screen depictions of club culture. Too often, they’re overwrought and hold little substance beyond visual flair. Not that eye candy holds no value—Blade’s blood rave is quintessential to “hell yeah” culture—but club and rave scenes sit parallel to sex scenes: important tools to show bonds between characters and their own states of mind, but frequently made artless and left lacking. The Last Year of Darkness is the first raver film I truly love.

A psuedo-documentary set in Chengdu, director Ben Mullinkosson pulls in and out of Funky Town, a club that sits at the ground floor of a five-over-one, vaguely hidden by the walls and noise of a massive subway station construction project. It’s the only way this small place in China’s fourth biggest city can host drag performances and queer parties with regularity, and it’s here that a drag queen, a classical musician struggling with depression, a Russian expat house DJ, and a resident DJ and promoter of a queer night regularly congregate.

We follow this cast of real people in and out of their daytime lives and within the walls of Funky Town, watching both unscripted reality and pre-scripted scenarios with no clear thread. Yihao the drag queen flirts with Gena the bicurious expat (and co-cinematographer) in the chillout lounge after Gena suggests they go on a date. Gena swipes on everyone in the vicinity opening dating apps across two phones, then resigns to downloading Grindr after no success. Kimberly the classical musician discusses self-growth and meditation with a friend in the smoking area, when another friend in the foreground starts feeling sick and desperately tries holding her vomit in; the camera steps back to show her throwing up into a small cup as the conversation continues in the background. Kimberly later reflects on her loneliness over text to her co-promoter for Funky Town’s queer party, Darkle, and in another sequence gives her friends, boyfriend, and the filmmakers a scare on a tall rooftop trying to get close to the edge. The camera’s presence is felt throughout the film but uses a subtle hand, allowing situations to happen naturally across long shots with fluid discussions. In these later sequences, where we’ve become quite close to these characters, it quickly feels wrong to be watching them and knowing so much of these real people.

At a post-screening Q&A moderated by Steven Yeun at Brain Dead Studios, Mullinkosson maintained he had no intent to make a film during his time in Chengdu—he was there in vacation mode on the basis of a fat check from a Meta commercial, looking forward to skating, eating, and partying. It was at Funky Town that Yihao planted the seed with a half-joke, asking Mullinkosson when he was going to make a film about him. Three years of filming and two years of post-production followed; all the while, the subway station got closer and closer to completion.

It’s Yihao who confronts Mullinkosson’s filmmaking by the end. After a drag performance, he paces in his dressing room distraught and confused. He doesn’t even like drag. He hates looking like a girl. He feels exhausted after every performance. He winces at the camera with a crack that it’s drag that gave him AIDS. Suddenly, he directly addresses Mullinkosson: “Ben, I don’t think your documentary can record me or anyone’s real life. I think real life is something you need to feel for yourself.” It’s the only time someone addresses the filmmaker by name.

There’s been a recent line of self-indictment in cinema in the past few years. In Jordan Peele’s Nope, the fictionalized descendents of a real Black man who starred in the first “motion picture” exploit our human instinct to peer at spectacle—until they heroically choose to look away. Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun examines how the moving picture distorts our memory, inherently telling stories even if the camera feels objective; a still camera pointed at the world is still a point of view. In the last year, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Glazer’s Zone of Interest set the towering examples as critiques of their own medium, asking what the point of telling stories about real atrocities is if we avoid our gaze in the mirror.

Much like these films, despite an acknowledgment of the moral quandary, The Last Year of Darkness is a completed film that’s been released. You have either watched it or have the option to watch it. Mullinkosson admits to finding the moment with Yihao in the edit again and agreeing with him. He also connects it to the sinking feeling he got as he filmed Kimberly on that rooftop where it seemed like she might fall: as Kimberly and her boyfriend argued about their relationship sitting near the edge, Mullinkosson stood behind the tripod and couldn’t parse what was said, thanks to an audio glitch. He intently left the camera alone anyway. In the film, after a long shot over a few minutes (the film’s most extended) of the couple against a wistful sunrise, he finally picks up the tripod and tries to move closer. Suddenly, Kimberly stands up and her boyfriend immediately grabs her. She maintains she just wants to see a better view, protesting at the group surrounding her who insist they have to leave. According to him, Mullinkosson almost ceased work on the film after that morning. It was Kimberly who looked back at the footage and convinced him to leave it in by telling him one thing: “Yihao is the drag queen. I’m the drama queen.” She and her boyfriend later agreed to go into the studio and ADR their rooftop argument for the scene’s inclusion in the film.

This is what I ultimately find lacking in today’s depictions of club culture, and more broadly of youth culture in general: real personality. Characters stand in for cultural tropes or archetypes, speaking for both everyone and no one at all. Here, the film has the boldness to present the lives of these real people as matters of fact. It doesn’t matter that there are some pre-scripted scenarios, or that we naturally put up our guards when a camera is placed in front of us—these little performances are the point.

Post-2010s, real-life dance culture has become too self-aware and too self-important. Rebelliousness is culturally tied to a greater good, like punk before dance, erasing specific cause and in great irony becoming for the sake of it. Dancing’s release becomes amorphous suggestion, not something naturally felt or seen in the body. In a search for intention in what’s, at its face, a culture of partying, this sort of empty storytelling has become a ritual of justification: parties advertise themselves as potentially life-changing places of congregation, DJs write essays for Instagram captions after particularly gratifying sets, and dancers everywhere are left searching for the next and bigger high.

What makes The Last Year of Darkness ultimately fascinating is its honest acknowledgment of its own flaws and its insistence on following through regardless. It reflects its subjects in that way: these kids have all found solace in the performance of dancing, deejaying, doing drag with each other; they also know they love drinking, doing balloons, sucking and fucking, and regretting some of it the next day. They sometimes feel crushingly lonely despite seeing each other as community. They may not be saviors to each other in the end but they know things will feel better for now as long as they show up. Yihao continues in his camera confrontation to Mullinkosson: “It’s not political. Nothing. It’s a natural state of being.” These subjects are real people with their own problems that don’t stand in service of a greater story. It’s maybe even morally questionable to see yourself in these people as a viewer.

It helps that Mullinkosson wants you to see these people as real people. They’re his friends. The moral question is something bigger to contribute to, not to remove yourself from. Here is his contribution.

This is the importance of the illusion of objectivity here: Mullinkosson and his editor Bobby Moser mostly present these people and their stories without fluff in the hopes that you connect with them without bias. We meet them like we meet random people in the club, stumbling upon connection. Their natural humor and curiosity is allowed to bleed through—Darkle gets a potentially all-timer last line in “I’m grateful I’ve sucked a lot of dicks in my life.”

Instead of a film that could easily get lost in the darkness of a club, they wisely use much of what they’ve shot outside Funky Town to provide a snapshot of a city. Funky Town eventually closes, after all—the subway station was always going to open, taking down the construction walls and silencing the morning noise.

Once we’ve gotten to know these people, Mullinkosson allows the documentary to become a film. The climax holds the sole needle-drop heart-tugger: Yihao, in the back of a van and presumably on the way to a show in full makeup, starts practicing his lip-syncing to a live recording of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” playing off his phone. We start hearing the music cue in full clarity, but instead of the original recording with a band, it remains Yihao’s choice of the live performance, Bowie simply singing over a piano. Over it, we revisit the cast of subjects: a struggling delivery boy skater from the start of the film meets up again with his friends and talks about embracing his humanity; Gena continues learning Mandarin; Kimberly happily dances with her boyfriend and ends up back on that beautiful rooftop, joyously embracing Darkle and eating with Gena; Yihao picks up his medicine in the daylight. We see Yihao in drag one last time as he enraptures a crowd, trawling the stage to Bowie’s soaring voice, then falling to his knees as the last notes of the piano fade. Yihao’s crowd erupts in applause as Bowie’s audience does too. After 80 minutes of assorted stories, a thesis pokes its head here: is there a life to be had on the margins? Yes, as there always has. There always will be life to live, more to celebrate, someone to love, anywhere you may be.

The film starts on the subway and ends on the subway, approaching one place and following its subjects to another.

The Last Year of Darkness is out now on MUBI.

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