![‘The Last Day’ Review: Alicia Vikander & Victoria Pedretti Drift Through Motherhood, Memory, And Mental Collapse In Rachel Rose’s Haunting Debut [Tribeca]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/09161605/The-Last-Day-Clean-16x9-01.jpg "‘The Last Day’ Review: Alicia Vikander & Victoria Pedretti Drift Through Motherhood, Memory, And Mental Collapse In Rachel Rose’s Haunting Debut [Tribeca]")
“The Last Day” opens on an elusive image: a dead deer in the road, with a fawn standing nearby in a state of confusion, shock, or some type of animal mourning. Director Rachel Rose does not overplay the moment, but she does let it hang over her directorial debut, a loose reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” built around mothers, children, dependency, grief, and the helplessness of needing comfort from a world often unable to provide it. An impending Fourth of July party gives the film its structure, as a hostess tries to keep the day moving with errands and such. But before the social rituals begin, “The Last Day” has already established its emotional register: something essential has been broken, and everyone is still standing near the damage, unsure what to do next.
Alicia Vikander plays Julia, a writer preparing to host that party while coming apart in ways she can barely explain to herself. She has the outward markers of stability: a home, a family, a social circle, and the practiced composure that others can easily mistake for “fine.” But the day becomes another form of labor, one more performance expected of her, and Vikander plays Julia’s exhaustion with a restraint that keeps tightening until the character seems almost trapped inside her own skin. Writer’s block is part of it, but Rose is after something larger and harder to isolate: the way creative paralysis, domestic obligation, dolor, and the loneliness of being unseen can all begin to feel like the same suffocating condition.
Running alongside Julia’s story is Taylor, played by Victoria Pedretti, with a raw, unnerving openness. Taylor is a young mother in the grips of postpartum depression, and if Julia’s crisis is hidden behind the machinery of hosting and polite conversation, Taylor’s is closer to the bone. She is isolated in a more literal and frightening sense, stranded inside a version of motherhood that the world insists should feel natural, clarifying, and full of purpose. Pedretti makes the character’s despair feel terrifyingly present because it is so ordinary in its details: the blankness, the shame, the physical heaviness of getting through a day when even basic care becomes impossible.
Rose does not force the connection between Julia and Taylor into a tidy, dramatic pattern. “The Last Day” moves by echo and association, letting the women’s lives brush against each other through mood, memory, and emotional recognition. That approach can be elliptical, and at times the film’s delicacy risks becoming too airy. But Rose, an acclaimed visual artist making her first feature, has a keen eye for how emotional distress can alter a space. The house feels open and claustrophobic at once. The summer light has a harsh, exposing quality, and children run through the frame with the careless freedom of people too young to understand that the adults around them are barely holding themselves together.
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The “Mrs. Dalloway” framework is clear in its single-day structure, social gathering, and attention to interior life, but Rose is not simply updating Woolf beat for beat. She uses the shape of the novel to think about contemporary motherhood, mental illness, caregiving, and how language often fails people at the very moment they need to be understood. The film is full of people who can speak the vocabulary of concern and still miss the crisis happening in front of them. They can ask whether someone is okay, but the question often lands as another social cue rather than a genuine opening.
![‘The Last Day’ Review: Alicia Vikander & Victoria Pedretti Drift Through Motherhood, Memory, And Mental Collapse In Rachel Rose’s Haunting Debut [Tribeca]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/09170304/Victoria-Pedretti-in-THE-LAST-DAY_Courtesy-of-Killer-Films--1024x614.jpg)
That is where Vikander’s performance becomes especially moving. Julia is not inarticulate because she lacks intelligence or self-awareness; she fails to communicate clearly because whatever is happening inside her has outpaced the language available to describe it. And as a writer, that’s a dark irony for the character. Vikander plays her as someone trying to keep a hand on the wheel while also, deep down, understanding that she is losing control. There is no grand breakdown in the obvious sense, no big actorly showcase built around a single scene of collapse. Instead, the performance accumulates in pauses, glances, and small hesitations, the nearly invisible distress that can go undetected because it never announces itself loudly.
Pedretti’s work is more exposed but just as carefully judged, and she’s a genuine revelation here; easily her most striking turn. Taylor could easily become a schematic portrait of postpartum suffering, but Pedretti keeps her specific and frighteningly present. She makes the character’s pain feel bodily, a condition that has moved beyond sadness into something heavier and more frightening. Together, Vikander and Pedretti give the film its emotional charge. They are playing women in very different circumstances, but both are caught in states of need that they cannot fully express and that the world around them does not know how to receive.
Wagner Moura appears briefly as an ex-boyfriend of Julia’s, a man who has moved on, or at least appears to have, with a wife and children of his own. But when the two see each other again, the polite rhythms of catching up quickly give way to something more wounded and unresolved, as old grievances and the end of their fractured relationship come rushing back into the room. It is a brief scene, but a memorable one, and a reminder that Moura can bring real force to even the smallest of moments. He gives the exchange a charge of history; the film does not need to over-explain.
“The Last Day” is sometimes too fragile for its own good, and its impressionistic structure may leave some viewers wanting a firmer dramatic shape. But as a debut, it is deeply felt, formally assured, and often piercing in its attention to what people fail to notice. Rose’s film understands that some emergencies do not look like five-alarm fires from the outside. They happen in bright rooms, at family gatherings, around children, during holidays, in the middle of days that everyone else will remember as ordinary.
Rose’s film is most moving when it stays with bewilderment before anyone has the words for it. That deer-in-headlights helplessness runs through Julia and Taylor, through the children around them, and through the silences everyone keeps mistaking for composure. What lingers is not a lesson or a neatly articulated crisis, but the stunned aftermath of rupture: something essential gone, and the body still drawn toward the place where it used to be. [B+]
