The Quiet Earth (1985)
This is a New Zealand film from 1985, and I managed to pick up the BD earlier in 2026 and finally got around to watching it.
I used to think I saw this for the first time as part of the UK cult film show Moviedrome but it actually seems that I didn’t. However I did manage to see it sometime in the late 1980s, and just once, but I must have liked it since stuck in my mind enough to track it down years later.
There will be spoilers!
What’s it all about??
The Quiet Earth is based around the idea of what happens if everyone on Earth disappears at once. The film posits several often original takes on this, such as a plane crashing into a town but there are no bodies in the wreckage. On the funnier side, a machine painting the centre line of a road just goes off into a field without the human to steer it.
We follow Zac, a scientist who has been working on some military experiment which he suspects has gone badly wrong. This means Zac accepts the concept of what happened quickly and that he may be the only one left. From a plot point of view this is convenient, but it also means the story gets off to a quick start.
Initially he looks for other people, leaving giant messages on billboards and records radio messages which he plays on loop from the local radio station.
As some time passes, he starts dressing as a policeman and having a bit of a laugh driving police cars around, because … why not, no one is looking. He also starts drinking.
He moves house a few times, initially from his small house into a huge mansion, which seems reasonable, before settling into somewhere a little smaller and more practical.
At times throughout the film there are flashes and pulses, but for most of the film they aren’t explained until Zac begins to form a hypothesis later on.
As you can tell, Zac’s loneliness continues to build and despite his often scientific thinking it leads him to all of those things he could now do without consequence. There’s a great scene in a shopping centre as he helps himself to a new wardrobe and other toys - shades of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ there.
He decides to drive a real train which got points for originality from me - you don’t often see that as something a character wants to do. He also makes up alter egos to have conversations with, and dresses up in the women’s clothes he finds.
He even contemplates suicide before setting up a massive PA system and addressing a crowd of life size cutouts he’s made of famous people in the garden. His speech as leader mainly addresses his part and guilt regarding whatever experiment or weapon has caused this.
Fairly reasonable behaviour if you think you’re the only person left, in my humble opinion.
Then the electricity stops.
We’re now 45 minutes in - literally half of the film’s runtime - before we see another human, a young woman called Joanne who is relieved to find someone else and the two seem to get along well enough.
Together they find some bodies as they drive around such as at the scene of a car crash and realise these people must have also been alive at some point after ’the effect’.
Eventually they meet another man - Api - who has his own more violent backstory and they begin to realise they’re alive now as they may have died at the same time as the initial ’effect'.
Between these discoveries Zac has been running tests and discovers the charge of an electron - an immutable constant - is fluctuating dangerously.
As they discuss this discovery and Zac calculates the likely timing of another effect event they debate if any of them are still real or if they’re really dead and a level of paranoia begins to creep in.
Zac suggests they blow up the grid station he worked at, potentially destroying the energy system he believes they were working on and which caused the Effect.
Zac secretly decides he’ll drive a truck full of explosives himself as a suicide mission, dying in the explosion just as the effect strikes again and as the credits roll we see Zac waking up on a beach as a Saturn-like planet rises above the horizon.
Thoughts
I absolutely still liked this film upon re-watching (second watching). The story offers a balance of the practical reality of survival and its effect on the characters, and feels quite original in execution. The lead character as a scientist, who simultaneously is trying to understand the flickering sun, whilst still holding on to his sanity is well played. It also maps to the fact that his connection to other survivors doesn’t seem that close, even when they’re enjoying themselves.
The discoveries Zac is making about how much time they have left and the fact that this world is doomed means it can’t be open ended yet has to offer some hope.
It might look a bit old and a bit cheap today, but it’s a very different take on this style of film, and the obviously real-world sets, buildings and equipment give it a real grounding, a bit like ‘28 Days Later’ would for zombies. The zombie parallel may be a close relation, with the empty streets and scenes of life seemingly frozen, and there’s no one around, except unlike zombie films there really is no-one around. Kettles are boiling over, toilet cubicles are locked from the inside but empty, it really captures a surreal example of the world without people.
The other characters fit well, and despite the 90 minute run-time, they get enough development, especially when they discuss how they survived that initial effect as it explains a lot about who they are now, and their motivations - Api leaves you guessing if he’s the violent threat, or just a man trying to move on.
That said, it leaves enough unsaid for you to speculate after the film: are they in a different dimension after the effect? Is Zac really committing suicide at the end or does he know that death at the time of the next effect will move him on to whatever comes after? Who knows.
The Quiet Earth
What is a Razor Review?
It’s a quick, short overview of whatever film, book etc. I’d just experienced. It’s OK to be short as I guarantee there are better reviews on line.