The Quiet Earth (1985)

The Quiet Earth fits into a genre that has been explored through numerous avenues of film making.  It is based the book The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison and explores the life of a man named Zac (Bruno Lawrence) after a catastrophic science project causes the entire universe to become unstable and on the verge of collapse.  This life-changing event causes every person on Earth to disappear except for Zac himself.  He copes with his lonely in stages of going crazy and submitting to his alternate personality, but regains his sanity in time to meet one other person that was left on the Earth, Joanne (Alison Routledge).  Eventually they meet another man, Api (Pete Smith), before the sun begins it's rapid decline into collapsing and taking the entire galaxy with it.

Now, as you can imagine, this plot line has been explored many times using different devices and these films never focus very much on the physical plot, rather the psyche of the different characters and group dynamics are analyzed as the characters are brought to terms with their own mortality.  Zombie movies continuously and frequently explore this mindset of being the last real human being on the planet as characterized by the original Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later (and sort of I Am Legend even though it's not quite a zombie movie).  However, what sets The Quiet Earth apart from these other movies is two emanating themes of existentialism and altered states of consciousness.  Zac brings forth the idea that nobody on Earth disappeared except for him and that Joanne and Api are manifestations of his subconscious mind in an attempt to cope with what is left of his own quasi-reality.  In addition to the constant question of whether they are actually alive, all three characters have had a near-death experience in which they were "drawn towards the light."  Since the solar system is so unstable, many strange mind-warping events happen that distort reality in unusual ways and disorients the three survivors.  The question that the viewer is left with by the end of the film is whether or not the whole experience was death, or whether the event really happened, or whether they were simply experiencing an altered state of mind induced by the science experiment, their near-death experiences, or something else entirely.  The Quiet Earth gets 4.5 out of 5.