Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine (Roadside Attractions)

Ann (Margot Robbie) is the last woman on Earth in Z for Zachariah, a post-apocalyptic thriller that’s more chamber drama than science fiction. The film poses big questions about the human condition and the future of the planet, but its drama is as old and basic as time itself: is this any kind of situation for a healthy relationship?

With the rest of the world tainted by radioactive fallout, the rural area where Ann lives is miraculously isolated enough so that its weather patterns allow for clean water and something like hope. She has only her faithful dog for a companion, but she has more or less mastered her sad fate, working the land as her preacher father taught her and playing pump organ in the chapel he built.

Ann’s solitude is broken when John (Chiwetel Ejiofor) arrives in a contamination suit. While he thinks he’s discovered some untouched paradise, he bathes under a waterfall that he doesn’t realize is contaminated, and Ann nurses John while he recovers from radiation sickness. Robbie and Ejiofor have an uneasy chemistry that suits the uncertainty two people who may be faced with repopulating the world may have. But of course, the last man and woman on earth don’t see eye to eye: she’s a devout Christian, while he’s a scientist and an atheist.

Based on a novel by Robert C. O’Brien—the pen-name for Robert Leslie Conly—the book reportedly answers all the questions you might have—like what happened? Nissar Modi’s adapted screenplay gets heavy handed, but it’s not weighed down by expository dialogue that explains exactly how the world got this way. The details of survival aren’t what interest the filmmakers. The film is at its heart about relationships and their difficulty, even in this petri dish at the end of the world.

It’s a difficulty further blurred when another human turns up in the form of Caleb (Chris Pine), cut from the same rural cloth as Ann. The film suggests that surviving the apocalypse may not be the hard part; what’s hard is the same kind of dynamic that makes the pre-apocalyptic world go around: love and companionship. Before Ann and John can resolve their relationship—he mistakenly thinks, since they’re the only people left in the world, they have time to think about it—another human complicates the equation with a formula that could leave John, who had finally discovered another human being, profoundly alone again.

Director Craig Zobel’s previous film was Compliance, a dry procedural inspired by psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiments with obedience and based on cases of crank callers convincing fast-food workers to make their staff perform humiliating acts. Z for Zacariah poses another kind of social experiment that comes off as a lush, feature-length Twilight Zone episode: to what lengths would you go to preserve your relationship at the end of the world?

If the film resolves its central problem, it doesn’t quite resolve its dramatic tension, so it’s a finally unsatisfying experiment, but the understated performances help overcome the sense that the last people on Earth are movie stars.

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Z for Zachariah
Directed by Craig Zobel
With Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine,
Rated PG – 13 for a scene of sexuality, partial nudity, and brief strong language
Running time 95 minutes
Opens today at E Street Landmark Cinema