The Last Day reimagines Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece Mrs Dalloway in a few ways. The directorial debut of decorated visual artist Rachel Rose, the stark drama (which premieres Saturday night at Tribeca Festival) is set in modern-day New York and reimagines the protagonist, Clarissa, as Julia (Alicia Vikander), a writer feeling drained of creativity and purpose while navigating motherhood. Rose was inspired by her own experiences with postpartum depression: After she came out of that period, she revisited Mrs Dalloway on the advice of a friend and drafted the script months later.
The film’s more ambitious gambit, though, is what it does with the other half of its story. It beefs up — and gender-swaps — the role of Septimus, a traumatized veteran losing sight of reality, to operate in parallel with Julia. “When I reread Mrs Dalloway, I was so moved and blown away by Septimus, a character that I hadn’t absorbed before, that I now was absorbing through my own experience, in his manic mental anguish and pain.”
Here, the role is reimagined as Taylor, a younger mother of three who, as the film opens, has a passing encounter with Julia before trying to go on with her own day. She’s portrayed by Victoria Pedretti — who broke out on Netflix’s You before starring opposite Jeremy Strong on Broadway in An Enemy of the People — in a devastating performance befitting Woolf’s bruising, spare and subtle characterization. “Victoria is so primal, and she brings that to how she experiences space and her body,” Rose says.
