The Last

To say that thespians live for opportunities such as this is an understatement, and Schull, whose restrained underplaying only makes the material more powerful, makes the most of it.

As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.

Schull's quietly commanding performance is a stunning piece of acting, in which the character seems to reveal new layers every time she's on screen.

Veteran performer Schull, perhaps best known as Fay on TV’s “Wings,” gives a towering, fearless turn; the other main actors are fine as well. Still, one must yield to the film’s flat shooting style, lengthy monologues, dangling questions and awkwardly rendered, dubiously earned ending.

Compared with “Us,” also in theaters now, the movie feels benign, almost polite — which can’t possibly be what Lipsky had in mind. No, he seems determined to shock, but his films are like those proverbial trees, falling noisily in empty forests. That’s not to say Lipsky should stop making movies — one hopes The Last won’t be his last — but that it might be a good time to take a serious look at what he’s trying to achieve, if hardly anyone’s paying attention.

A perplexing conundrum of a film: a potentially profound concept buried beneath layers of amateurishness.