{"id":3149,"date":"2026-06-08T23:07:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T23:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/06\/08\/the-last-day-review-alicia-vikander-and-victoria-pedretti-shine-in-a-mrs-dalloway-reinterpretation-about-the-perils-of-modern-motherhood\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T23:07:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T23:07:00","slug":"the-last-day-review-alicia-vikander-and-victoria-pedretti-shine-in-a-mrs-dalloway-reinterpretation-about-the-perils-of-modern-motherhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/06\/08\/the-last-day-review-alicia-vikander-and-victoria-pedretti-shine-in-a-mrs-dalloway-reinterpretation-about-the-perils-of-modern-motherhood\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Last Day\u2019 Review: Alicia Vikander and Victoria Pedretti Shine in a \u2018Mrs. Dalloway\u2019 Reinterpretation About the Perils of Modern Motherhood"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\tIt often takes a second while watching The Last Day<\/em>, the feature debut by writer-director Rachel Rose, to make out exactly what it is we\u2019re looking at.<\/p>\n

\tAn extreme close-up of fur eventually reveals itself to be a deer. White light bouncing off a slick surface turns out to be the hood of an SUV. A blur of red and white slowly comes into focus as a display of packaged meats. <\/p>\n

\n
\n

\t \t \t\t \t\t\t\t\tThe Last Day\t\t \t <\/h3>\n

The Bottom Line<\/span> \t\t\t\t\t \t \tA pair of powerhouse performances. \t<\/span> \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Venue:<\/strong> Tribeca Festival (Spotlight Narrative)
Cast:<\/strong> Alicia Vikander, Victoria Pedretti, Wagner Moura
Director-screenwriter:<\/strong> Rachel Rose
\t\t\t \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRated N\/A, \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 39 minutes\t\t\t<\/span> \t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\tUntil these images resolve themselves, we are lost, out of sync with a world we should know yet can\u2019t quite seem to make sense of \u2014 not unlike protagonists Julia (Alicia Vikander<\/a>) and Taylor (Victoria Pedretti<\/a>), moms who don\u2019t quite seem at home in their lives either. Loosely inspired by Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>, The Last Day<\/em> delivers a take on the perils of modern motherhood that\u2019s most powerful for the precision of its eye and the sensitivity of its performances, even as its storytelling tilts toward cryptic. \t<\/p>\n

\tThe film, which premieres at Tribeca<\/a>, borrows the basic structure of Virginia Woolf\u2019s classic. (In this, The Last Day<\/em> is not alone on the festival circuit \u2014 Neon\u2019s Cannes premiere Clarissa<\/a><\/em> transposes the action to modern-day Lagos.) In a tony suburb outside New York City, Julia sets out to run some errands ahead of her annual Fourth of July party later that night. At one of her first stops, a bakery, she encounters but does not interact with Taylor, a frazzled mom on her own day of errands.<\/p>\n

\tJulia does pick up the wallet Taylor has dropped in the parking lot, mentally adding \u201creturn wallet to address on driver\u2019s license\u201d to her to-do list. But The Last Day<\/em> is concerned less with this direct intersection of their lives \u2014 so glancing it registers as barely a blip to both women \u2014 than the ways they compare and contrast on a thematic level. And Rose, known for her video installations, relies more on striking imagery and sound than propulsive storytelling to cast her spell, yielding an experience whose impact is more easily felt than explained. \t<\/p>\n

\tFor Julia, a once-promising writer who hasn\u2019t penned anything since getting married and having a child over a decade earlier, this Independence Day becomes a bridge between the ghosts of her past and the potential of her future.<\/p>\n

\tShe has a serendipitous encounter with a novelist ex-boyfriend, Peter (a soulful Wagner Moura<\/a>), that sours as they return to what we sense are oft-repeated arguments about the choices they\u2019ve made regarding career and family. A meeting with a literary agent, Ellen (Marin Ireland), serves as an uncomfortable reminder of how long it\u2019s been since she even tried to create. A visit to her father\u2019s apartment, now being cleared out to sell, sparks renewed grief over his recent death and bittersweet memories of the mother who abandoned her.<\/p>\n

\tBy contrast, Taylor\u2019s day, which takes her and her newborn from the pediatrician\u2019s office to the local library to the grocery store, feels stuck in an unbearable present. We get only the barest hints of her history for much of the film, and no plausible sense of what she envisions for herself. Even the brief flashbacks that cut in during an emotional moment for Taylor belong not to her but to Julia \u2014 as if Taylor has become so disconnected from her existence that she has none of her own memories of being a new mother singing her baby to sleep.<\/p>\n

\tWhat is clear, from the very first moments of Pedretti\u2019s tremendously raw performance, is that this is a woman in crisis. Costume designer April Napier puts Julia in a sweatshirt the color of a fire engine, which, amid upstate New York\u2019s tasteful tree-lined streets, looks almost as jarring as the sirens that occasionally pierce the idyllic soundscape. But Pedretti carries Taylor with the tentative, almost reluctant posture of a woman who\u2019d just as soon disappear into the ether. \t<\/p>\n

\tWhen Taylor talks, her words betray a desperate anxiety. But Pedretti is most devastating in all the moments Taylor doesn\u2019t<\/em> push back: not when her husband gets called away to work in her time of need, not when a security guard demands she re-scan her grocery items, not when her psych tells her she just needs to be patient with her new meds. These people (mostly men) seem to accept her docility as proof she\u2019s doing fine, or at least not doing badly enough to cause any problems. To us, though, it reads in accumulation as the emptiness of a woman who has nothing left at all.<\/p>\n

\tThat tendency toward under-reaction, socialized into these women by a society with limited interest in their true feelings, is key as well to Vikander\u2019s precision-tuned performance. When a younger colleague of her husband\u2019s describes her as \u201ca grownup,\u201d or Ellen airily declares her \u201crespect\u201d for stay-at-home moms (\u201cI couldn\u2019t do it!\u201d), Julia keeps her face the perfectly composed picture of social grace. But we can feel the irritation or frustration bubbling just underneath, having gotten to know a less guarded version of her through more private moments. <\/p>\n

\tStill, it\u2019s different for Julia than it is for Taylor. Though Julia may have resigned herself to the stultifying life of an upper-class wife and mother, she has enough fire to bristle when Peter suggests she could have kept writing if she\u2019d wanted to, to squirm with embarrassment when Ellen asks what she\u2019s been working on \u2014 and, late in the film, to give herself over to awe as fireworks fill the sky. \t<\/p>\n

\tOver and over in The Last Day<\/em>, characters struggle to make sense of their current states. \u201cI\u2019m so fucking startled by where I am,\u201d Julia confesses to Peter. \u201cIt\u2019s my fault. We\u2019re trapped and I can\u2019t get them out,\u201d Taylor\u2019s hoarse voiceover goes in the middle of an emotional spiral. Not even the environment around them is immune to this confusion. In the very first scene, a baby deer stares at its mother lying dead on the side of the road, and looks around like it\u2019s trying to piece together what has transpired.<\/p>\n

\tThe Last Day<\/em> has no answers to these implicit questions, or at least not any tidy ones. What it does have is the curiosity to observe its characters\u2019 disillusionment and the empathy to share in their complicated emotions \u2014 and the imagination to find the grasp toward transcendence embedded in the mundane.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It often takes a second while watching The Last Day, the feature debut by writer-director Rachel Rose, to make out exactly what it is we\u2019re looking at. An extreme close-up of fur eventually reveals itself to be a deer. White light bouncing off a slick surface turns out to be the hood of an SUV. A blur of red and white slowly comes into focus as a display of packaged meats. The Last Day The Bottom Line A pair of powerhouse performances. Venue: Tribeca Festival (Spotlight Narrative)Cast: Alicia Vikander, Victoria Pedretti, Wagner MouraDirector-screenwriter: Rachel Rose Rated N\/A, 1 hour 39 minutes Until these images resolve themselves, we are lost, out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1813,2,59,60,1322,1712,361,956,1814,357],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alicia-vikander","category-hollywood","category-movie-reviews","category-movies","category-tribeca","category-tribeca-2026","category-tribeca-festival","category-tribeca-film-festival","category-victoria-pedretti","category-wagner-moura"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}