One Hundred Mornings’ new spin on the future

Conor Horgan’s feature film debut doesn’t follow the usual script for an apocalyptic tale, writes Pádraic Killeen

COUNTLESS movies have taken the end of the world as their subject over the years. Drenched in adrenalin and romance, such films invariably feature explosion after explosion before, ultimately, Bruce Willis or some such figure fixes everything just in the nick of time. Very few apocalypse films, however, have ever heeded TS Eliot’s famous assertion that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper. Conor Horgan’s debut, One Hundred Mornings, is a rare film that bucks the trend, opting to stage the whimper, and to make this whimper insistently tense and engaging.

A hit at festivals worldwide, Horgan’s apocalyptic narrative focuses on a small group of survivors in the wake of an unexplained societal collapse. The central protagonists — two young couples — are holed up in a lakeside house in the Dublin Mountains. In addition to maintaining strained ties with the armed and scavenging inhabitants of a nearby village, they must also overcome strife in their own camp.