Last Minute (2026)
Some shorts are over before you have really had the chance to take their measure, and Last Minute is one of them. Sam Brain's five-minute piece sets up an intriguing, charged little situation and then ends almost the moment it gets going, leaving me genuinely unsure what to make of it. There is clearly something here, but there is simply not enough of it to judge, so I have landed on a middle-of-the-road two and a half stars.
It opens well, with a bald man racing across town to catch another man before he leaves on a journey. The two of them plainly have history, and the air between them crackles with an unspoken sexual tension that the film handles with a nicely understated touch. They kiss, but the second man pulls back, telling the first not to get drawn into this again, and for a moment you feel the weight of whatever it is they once were to each other.
Then the situation tilts. A woman arrives home, and we learn that the man is in a relationship with her, that the two of them are about to head off on a backpacking adventure together, and that he is being distinctly cagey about the man he has just kissed. The short is really about that evasion, a person hiding his past, and perhaps his sexuality, behind the story he has chosen to tell about his life. It is a sharp, sad little idea, buried love and quiet denial, and in its brief window the film gestures at it effectively.
And then it is over, far too abruptly for me to say whether it is any good. Five minutes is not long to establish three people, a shared history and a secret, and the ending arrives just as the drama is beginning to breathe. I was left with the frustrating sense of a scene rather than a story, a promising fragment that stops before it can become anything. There is talent and restraint on show, but not enough runtime to know where it was all heading.
Two and a half stars. Last Minute is a well-played, intriguingly ambiguous sketch about denial and the things we hide from the people closest to us, let down by a running time so short it cannot deliver on its own setup. I would be curious to see what Brain does with more room, because the instinct here is good, but as it stands this is one I can only meet squarely in the middle.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More drama: Delisted (2026), Lady (2026), These Violent Delights (2026)
