This Is How the World Ends – Fiction or Omen?

The cinematography is excellent, and some scenes are reminiscent of a music video, while many parts feel as though they could have come from a Mad Max film, although the landscape here is by no means artificially created like in the recent films of that franchise. Sean Cameron Michael’s portrayal of the character Rick “The Broadcaster” Douglas inevitably brings to mind Woody Harrelson’s eccentric Charlie Frost in 2012 (2009), the loner who broadcasts the approaching end of the world from his remote base while the rest of humanity is still trying to make sense of what is happening around them. The music contributes nicely to the whole precisely because it doesn’t stand out, but rather blends in with the mostly barren landscape.

Various world accents can be heard, which makes sense in the storyline, since people have come from far and wide to the southern tip of Africa (after places like Europe were already destroyed). What did bother me was that the accent of Tom and Dani’s father (played by Peter Butler) differs so much from theirs. I really couldn’t place it at all, while Tom and Dani’s accents sounded very American, which doesn’t really make sense if they are supposed to be South Africans. But perhaps they aren’t?

The film’s message also extends beyond what happens on screen. The Guardian describes This Is How the World Ends as the first film in about 20 years to be released directly on VHS. This happened on 7 June 2026, deliberately planned to coincide with World VCR Day, before the film finds its way first to a few select cinemas and then to streaming services. It was a deliberate choice in an era of digitisation and AI-generated content. Dos Santos himself says: “I love the idea that you need to be part of the club to watch this.” In an interview with Variety he goes even further, describing the film as something “made by humans, for humans”, while the VHS release is referred to as a deliberate middle finger to AI. There is something especially fitting about a film about a humanity losing control over artificial intelligence being released on one of the most tangible, imperfect and unmistakably analogue formats imaginable.

I recently read that China has drawn an important legal line by ruling that companies may not simply dismiss employees because AI can now do their work. Dos Santos’ premise may be science fiction, but the warning behind it is by no means limited to Hollywood. People at the forefront of the AI revolution, like Sam Altman himself, have been warning for years that the technology is developing faster than the safeguards and regulation meant to keep it in check.

It is by far not the first or only film of its kind, especially in terms of themes that are so relevant today. Still, Dos Santos gives the film an unmistakable identity of its own. I was especially impressed with the opening moments of the film, which immediately captured my imagination. They set the tone early on for the atmosphere of the rest of the film and made me wonder how everything would eventually end.

It feels like only a few years ago that films like this were truly still just science fiction, but now we no longer know what to expect next. It makes one wonder whether fiction is imitating reality, or whether reality is perhaps catching up with fiction.

As Dani says early in the film: “I’m finally doing what I wanna do instead of what everyone else expects from me.” Ultimately, we all have a choice about what we do with the time we have. And if the robots finally come for us, Dos Santos’ film asks us: where do you want to spend your last day, how, and with whom?