Last and First Men

Last and First Men (2020) is an Icelandic science-fiction film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson in his sole feature before his death, with narration by Tilda Swinton.

Two billion years from now, the last surviving form of humanity transmits a message backward through time. It is not a plot, exactly — it is a document. A compressed history of everything that follows our era: species that rise, collapse, rebuild, and finally face extinction beneath an expanding sun. Swinton reads the text in a calm, precise voice while the camera moves slowly across monumental brutalist structures built across Yugoslavia during the Cold War, repurposed here as monuments of civilizations we will never know.

Jóhannsson conceived the film as a scored visual essay rather than a narrative feature — 72 minutes that ask you to sit with the idea that all of human time is a brief middle chapter. It rewards patience and will leave some viewers unmoved. That is probably the point. Stream Last and First Men (2020) online on iFILM.