119 min | R | August 28, 2026 | 20th Century Studios
Ridley Scott takes the most worn-out premise in the genre and builds something gorgeous and visceral out of it. A haunting elegy for everything we take for granted.
The setup could not be more familiar. A pandemic empties the world, and a man lives out of a Colorado airplane hangar with his dog and a gunman he barely trusts. Mark L. Smith adapts Peter Heller’s novel, and on paper it reads like a hundred other post-apocalypse stories. Ridley Scott knows this and does not care. He treats the well-trodden premise as a vessel, not a destination, and pours into it some of the finest dramatic work he has directed in years. The film is not about the end of the world. It is about what a person still owes the people left in it.
Jacob Elordi shines in a way his previous work only hinted at. His performance is prosaic in the best sense, built from small daily rituals rather than big speeches, and it layers grief, regret, and a yearning for normalcy into a man who mostly just wants to fly his plane and keep his dog alive. His Hig is such a genuinely decent person that he burns with earnestness, and it never seems forced or false. Margaret Qualley matches him and finds new registers of her own, her eager openness to build anew offsetting him perfectly. Together they build something rare in this genre, a portrait of chosen family that feels earned rather than convenient. Josh Brolin’s dour gunman anchors the early stretches, all pragmatism and buried decency, and the friction between his survivalism and Elordi’s stubborn humanity gives the film its moral spine.
Scott’s craft is everywhere. Soaring aerial photography from the old Cessna punctuates the ground-level scenes, and the alternation between the two becomes the film’s grammar. From the air the emptied world is beautiful. On the ground it is a graveyard. The film keeps connecting personal loss to civilizational loss until the two become indistinguishable, and the near-future backdrop stops being genre furniture and starts carrying real weight. The sound design does enormous work, letting silence and radio static say what dialogue does not.
This is an exquisitely crafted and haunting film, a eulogy for the ordinary world delivered without excess sentimentality. Scott has made plenty of spectacle in his late career. This is something else, patient and mournful and alive. It lingers.