Upon Last Days’ 2005 release, Gus Van Sant spoke with Filmmaker Magazine about his Death Trilogy. “All three films give profiles that are kind of like X-rays of the people,” he said. “What really happened to [Kurt] Cobain [just before he died]? Probably not that much. He probably just wandered around the house.” Such is the approach to one of the filmmaker’s most lyrical, and even peaceful, efforts.

Light on script but heavy on texture, the film stars Michael Pitt as Blake, an anhedonic rockstar loosely based on Cobain who spends his days calming himself in nature and rotting in his dilapidated house. Following Gerry and Elephant, Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides extend their previous work to a picture where music sounds like dialogue and talking feels like noise. The spatial awareness, meanwhile, is marvelously stilted, its mise-en-scène virtually dismembered at first blush to hypnotic effect. Add in long takes, the precision of Van Sant’s editing, and brief appearances from Kim Gordon and Harmony Korine, and the experience complements Blake’s internal suffering with an external, dreamlike specificity of high visual contrast best felt on a 35mm print. The protagonist may read like a ghost in the making, but from Last Days’ patience and textural flow comes a meditation on the loss of self in the throes of depression. There is just the death of feeling, and then an end. — Matt Cipolla