General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Long Day's Journey Into Night (地球最后的夜晚) (2018 film)

Long Day's Journey Into Night (地球最后的夜晚, Di qiu zuihou de yewan, literally "The Last Night on Earth") is a 2018 Chinese neo-noir art film written and directed by Bi Gan, his second feature after Kaili Blues (2015). It follows Luo Hongwu, a man who returns to his hometown of Kaili in Guizhou province and searches for a mysterious woman he has never been able to forget, and it closes with an hour-long sequence shot (one continuous take without any cuts) presented in 3D.¹^•² The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and won three Golden Horse Awards.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Bi Gan, who also wrote the screenplay with the novelist Chang Ta-Chun as consultant¹
Premiere	Un Certain Regard, 2018 Cannes Film Festival³
Runtime	138 minutes; a 130-minute Cannes version also exists³^•⁴
Principal cast	Tang Wei, Huang Jue, Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong-Chi, and Chen Yongzhong²
Signature device	An hour-long continuous sequence shot, post-converted to 3D, forming the film's second half⁵
Awards	55th Golden Horse Awards (2018): Best Cinematography, Best Sound Effects, Best Original Film Score⁴
Chinese box office	Grossed the equivalent of US$41 million after a New Year's Eve 2018 release promoted as a romantic date movie²
Critical scores	95% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (91 reviews); 68% Popcornmeter⁶

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film is set at the turn of the millennium and divides into two unequal parts, labeled First Stage and Second Stage in the end credits because they come from two distinct phases of production.² In the first part, Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) returns to Kaili after his father's death. Twelve years earlier his friend White Cat (Lee Hong-Chi) was murdered, and while pursuing the killer Zuo Hongyuan (Chen Yongzhong) Luo was used by Zuo's lover, the mysterious Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who then disappeared and became the center of his memories, desires, and nightmares. His search leads him to a soon-to-be-abandoned movie theater.⁴

Two halves, two logics. The first part is fractured and digressive, mixing imagined flashbacks and fantasy projections of possible futures with the noir search; the second is an elaborate hour-long sequence shot unfolding in real time, set in mid-winter and drifting toward a tenuous romantic ending as a distorted mirror of the first.² Inside the theater Luo puts on 3D glasses and enters a dream in which he meets figures from his past, including a woman who resembles Wan Qiwen, and in the dream he can even fly with his beloved.⁴ The film is loaded with internal cross-references: recurring visual motifs and colors, repeated lines of dialogue, and parallel backstories, and two lead actresses from the first part reappear in the second as different women.²

Origins and production

Bi Gan took the English title from Poppy and Memory (1952), a collection of poems by Paul Celan, and divided the film into two parts titled "Poppy" and "Memory." The idea for the split structure emerged from his screenplay conversations with Chang Ta-Chun. The project began as a film noir in the style of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, which Bi then deconstructed by interchanging and relocating scenes.¹ Despite the title, the film has no connection to Eugene O'Neill's play of the same name; Bi simply liked the title.²

The shoot was troubled at the start: Bi stopped it on the very first day because he was unhappy with the decor, and work resumed after the artistic director Liu Qiang stepped in. The production was halted once or twice more and finished only in mid-February 2018, days before Chinese New Year.¹ Compared with the low-budget Kaili Blues, the new film had a crew of 200, three major stars, cameo appearances, and a record-setting number of producers and foreign funding entities; it was a co-production spanning the People's Republic of China, France, Taiwan, the USA, Germany, Qatar, and Japan.² Bi cast Tang Wei after imagining the flying woman from Marc Chagall's painting The Promenade and deciding her face fit the part; Sylvia Chang was chosen to play roles including Luo's mother.¹ The crew included cinematographer David Chizallet⁷ and composer Lim Giong, whose score the Golden Horse archive describes as psychedelic.³

The 3D long take

The latter hour of the film is a single gravity-defying take, converted to 3D after shooting, in which the main character, at times seen through his eyes, travels by zip line and drone from a hilltop into a maze-like cluster of partly deserted buildings.⁵ The BFI's recommendation essay describes the closing shot as 55 minutes long and argues that, unlike many contemporary long takes, it feels intimate and vital to the film's mood, releasing the audience from the rules the first hour established.⁸ The device extends the practice of Kaili Blues, whose famous 41-minute long take intertwined past, present, and future; here the non-chronological time is transposed onto memory and dilated into a dream.⁹

The 3D is diegetically motivated: Luo sits in a cinema auditorium and puts on the glasses himself, and the journey leads through a tunnel, a pool hall, and a town in the grip of a festival.¹⁰ Critics have placed the film in a lineage of divided-structure works, noting its echoes of Wong Kar-wai's romanticism in the first half and Pedro Costa's empty spaces in the final sequence,⁸ and its inheritance of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's two-halves-in-different-registers device.¹¹

Release and the Chinese box office phenomenon

When the film opened in Chinese theaters on New Year's Eve 2018, it was backed by a hard-driving social media push that framed it as a romantic countdown event: moviegoers were urged to take their seats at 11 p.m. and, after experiencing the film's dream, step out into the new year.¹¹ Promotional messaging played on the Chinese title, asking potential viewers what sweet talk they would use to invite someone to "the last film of 2018, The Last Night On Earth."¹²

Backlash and gross. Many cinema-goers expecting a romcom found a challenging art film instead, and the mismatch produced an online backlash; even so, by that point the film had grossed the equivalent of US$41 million.²^•¹² The episode made the film a widely discussed case of marketing an auteur work as a mass-audience date movie.

Reception

Critical response was strongly favorable. Rotten Tomatoes records a 95% Tomatometer from 91 reviews, with a critics consensus that the film "may flummox viewers looking for an easy-to-follow story" but that Bi Gan's visual command and technical risk-taking pay off; the audience Popcornmeter stood at 68%.⁶ Metacritic aggregated 23 critic reviews.⁷ Reviewers singled out the second half's technical accomplishment: the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars, praising its "artistry and audacity,"⁶ and Sight and Sound called it an "extravagant art noir" that wows in three dimensions.² At the 55th Golden Horse Awards the film won Best Cinematography, Best Sound Effects, and Best Original Film Score, and was nominated for Best Narrative Feature and Best Director.³^•⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026