Toronto. Patrick (Don McKellar) is doing his best to avoid that last 'Christmas' dinner with his parents. He wants to die alone. Sandra (Sandra Oh) just wants to get home to husband Duncan (David Cronenberg) so they can leave this world together. He, in turn, is finishing up his job as boss of the gas company, ringing around each and every customer to reassure them that supplies will flow right to the end. Craig (Keith Rennie) is on a sexual bender, leaving few stones unturned: on his last night he will bed a virgin and even his old French teacher (Geneviève Bujold).

We never learn why. Don McKellar, who also writes and directs, isn't interested in the nuts and bolts. These are the last six hours of humanity, redolent with nostalgia and casual violence. There are inevitable echoes of Steve DeJarnatt's excellent but little seen 1989 end-of-the-worlder Miracle Mile. McKellar's film, though, owes more to the sombre, understated cinema of his former employer, Atom Egoyan. The clues were there, though, in his writing for the invigorating Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and his delightful short, Blue (again with Cronenberg). Last Night benefits from an elegant, unhurried screenplay.

Interestingly, religion plays very little part in The End, aside from the occasional oblique reference. The panic is over - they've known for four months - and it's now about finding the right note on which to exit. People are ritualising their deaths, looking for profundity - that Christmas dinner, the right musical accompaniment, a mutual suicide pact - when profundity counts for nothing with no one to remember. The tone of the final half hour is melancholic, resigned, but so much of the remainder is surprisingly funny. ("See you," offers Craig. "No you won't," says Patrick.)

It's a delicate balancing act, but what raises McKellar's game is his ability to convince us that, yes, this really is it. We have to buy into his world, care about his people. And we do, with excellent performances cast from the Egoyan/Cronenberg rep company (Sarah Polley and Arsinèe Khanjian - Mrs Egoyan - are also on hand). The film is perfectly scored.

An understated, quietly insightful and curiously life-affirming movie about the apocalypse then. It's the end of the world as we know it and, yes, thank you, I'm feeling fine.