The Quiet Earth

The Quiet Earth (1985) is a New Zealand science-fiction thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Scientist Zac Hobson wakes one morning to find that every other person on the planet seems to have vanished.

At first it plays like freedom. Any house, any car, an entire world to himself. But the empty streets and dead silence start to chip away at his mind. Zac suspects the cause is Flashpoint, a secret experiment he helped run, and the equipment back in the lab is still humming along on its own. Then he finds two more survivors, Joanne and Api, and notices a chilling thread linking the three of them: each was at the edge of death the instant everyone else disappeared.

Directed by Geoff Murphy and adapted from Craig Harrison's novel, the film rests on Bruno Lawrence's haunted lead performance. A small, three-hander story opens out into a meditation on loneliness and guilt, with a final image that fans have argued over for decades. Stream The Quiet Earth (1985) online on iFILM.