Edinburgh International Film Festival: The Last Photograph

One might expect a film featuring the 1988 Lockerbie bombing to be a highly emotive viewing experience, but director and star Danny Huston's The Last Photograph '“ which had its second EIFF screening at the weekend '“ takes a deliberately low-key approach to the terrorist atrocity, using it instead as the backdrop to a film about the lingering hold grief exerts upon the bereaved.
The Last PhotographThe Last Photograph
The Last Photograph

The Last Photograph ***

Filmhouse, Edinburgh

Set in 1988 and 2003, the film revolves around Tom Hammond (Huston), a London banker turned bookshop proprietor whose closed-off life is thrown into disarray when shoplifters randomly steal a bag containing a Polaroid of his son (Jonah Hauer-King) taken shortly before he boarded Pan Am Flight 103 some 15 years earlier.

If this set-up feels slightly contrived, the fractured narrative style Huston subsequently deploys – jumping back and forth in time, offering impressionistic glimpses of Tom’s relationship with his son and his son’s burgeoning relationship with the American girl he’s fallen for (she’s the reason he gets on the fateful flight to New York) – does help convey the psychological difficulty of trying to make sense of this kind of tragedy, even years down the line.

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But the film is at its most effective when dealing with Lockerbie directly. Making sensitive use of archival news footage and artful sound design, Huston combines these with scenes of Tom calmly driving to Lockerbie in shock, unable to accept the inevitable. Stripped free of melodrama, it gives the film a quiet power, something Huston compliments with a poignant finale set at the Lockerbie memorial.