LAST DAYS

Last Days, the brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sants artistic rebirth, wafts through the final 48 or so hours of a Kurt-Cobain-like rock star. Like Elephant, Van Sants Columbine meditation, Last Days zeroes in on the hallucinatory stillness of a final countdown. It shares with the earlier film a compressed time frame and aspect ratio, as well as a slippery, cosmic, almost four-dimensional sense of space and time, achieved again via remarkable technical means: Harris Savides fluid camerawork, Leslie Shatzs layered sound design, Van Sants instinctual editing. As in Elephant, the iconographic details of a mythic tragedy are faithfully reproduced, and they float by in a narcotic fog, charged with meaning but untouched by the organizing principles of conventional narrative. (Dennis Lim)