Review of One Hundred Mornings in Independent Film Quarterly

One Hundred Mornings
If Harold Pinter did a rewrite of The Road, it could easily resemble One Hundred Mornings; eschewing multi-million dollar CGI special-effects and giant fireballs for an emphasis on actual story and character, Irish filmmaker Conor Horgan and cast craft an intimate look at the emotional and spiritual toll the apocalypse could bring to one’s life. Unfolding in a quaint Irish mountainside, two couples eek out a rustic existence in what at first seems like a vacation gone a few days too long. Signs begin appearing though that all is not as it appears with armed gunmen roaming the roads and basic supplies coming into sharp demand. It becomes all too apparent that society has fundamentally broken down but the cause is never explained; this open-ended approach allows the viewer to impart his or her own backstory, any other explanation would be little more than a MacGuffin to move the action along. Again though, the emphasis is placed on character. The four main characters Jonathan, Hannah, Katie, and Mark are two couples that are forced to wait things out in this remote cabin; there’s no exposition on how they came to arrive there, how they knew each other previously, etc. All we know is they’ve been there for two months and live next door to a survivalist hippie named Tim. Tensions already brew when we meet them over claustrophobia and dwindling supplies as well as a bout of infidelity which doesn’t help either. One Hundred Mornings essentially boils down to an endurance test for viewers to see how much degradation and heartbreak can be endured in a two-hour sitting. As the story moves on, characters die, relationships break down further, and the barest layers of human civility are dissolved. And yet, hope does exist if not in a grand gesture then rather a resignation to accepting this particular end of the world. It’s a tough journey to take but shows the resiliency of the human spirit in the face of complete social breakdown.