In January, the Doomsday Clock remained set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever come to tolling the hour of the apocalypse. From climate change to global conflict, unregulated AI and predictions of the next pandemic, the world is teetering on the brink. A film like Panic in Year Zero!, which imagines life in the United States after civilization has crumbled, feels more prescient than ever.
Early one morning an ordinary American family, the Baldwins, set out from suburban Los Angeles for a camping trip in the mountains, trailer in tow. There’s Harry (Ray Milland), easy-going and charming, the sort of man who jokingly flirts with his wife while their two teenage children doze in the backseat; Ann (Jean Hagen), who flirts right back; and Rick (Frankie Avalon) and Karen (Mary Mitchel), whose major complaint is that their parents are infuriatingly jolly for such an ungodly hour.
The Baldwins haven’t been on the road long when they’re startled by unusual flashes of light. Puzzled, they get out of their car just in time to see an enormous mushroom cloud billow out above L.A. The car radio only picks up static; phone lines are down. Further up the road, they stop for petrol and witness another customer attack the attendant because he doesn’t have the money to pay. Soon the Baldwins will be following his lead.
From the moment the camera first catches sight of that cloud, Panic in Year Zero! grabs its audience by the throat and refuses to let go. Milland, who directed as well as starred in the film, meticulously ratchets up the tension as society unravels and people begin to recategorise each other as predators and prey. Screenwriters John Morton and Jay Simms also make the most of the film’s modest budget, avoiding large-scale set pieces and instead focusing on smaller, character-driven scenes. We follow the Baldwins’ journey closely, often joining them in the confines of their car, as they struggle to reach what they hope will be safety in the Sierra Nevadas. The dangers they face are rooted not in the atomic disaster itself, but in its decidedly human fallout: predatory shop owners who inflate prices for basic necessities; thugs who prowl the back roads looking for targets. We don’t see the destruction of L.A., New York, Philadelphia, London and Paris. We receive bulletins over emergency radio broadcasts—dispatches from a world on fire.
No character grasps how much the world has changed more than Harry. Milland was one of Hollywood’s great thinkers—adept at conveying a character’s thought processes on screen—and he puts that talent to great use in Panic as we watch Harry process information and reorient his existence around one goal: survival. Despite Ann’s protests, Harry quickly abandons the idea of returning to L.A. There’s no point. Everything and everyone they knew is gone. Suddenly, Harry is a man who knows finding a small, out of the way town is the best chance he and his family will have of getting the supplies they need to live. Suddenly, he’s a man prepared to set part of a highway on fire so they can stop traffic long enough to cross. Suddenly, he’s a man willing to kill.
Ann tells Harry she doesn’t recognize who he’s become and Jean Hagen makes each appeal to his better nature feel vital, a necessary check lest he lose himself completely. Morton and Simms don’t take the easy route of mocking her instincts. But their script demonstrates over and over that Ann’s morals are a luxury best suited for another place and time. Mercy has a cost; cruelty is free.
In an effort to reassure her, Harry tells Ann they must be ruthless to survive. Civilization will recover and he wants their family to be amongst those who help rebuild it. But the Baldwins ultimately take refuge in a cave, an irony which seems lost on them but is painfully apparent to us.
Panic in Year Zero! makes an interesting companion piece to Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (2023). As in Panic, an ordinary family of four leave a major American city (New York this time) for a holiday, only to find that the world is ending, with mass cyber attacks and microwave weapons taking the place of nuclear annihilation. Panic succeeds where the more recent film fails because it clearly defines the existential threats the Baldwins face and has them react in sometimes admirable, sometimes fallible, but always convincing ways. The hazards in Leave are so vague they seem abstract; the Baldwins confront horrors that are terribly, inescapably real.
Released just three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis and a corresponding spike in nuclear dread, Panic in Year Zero! ends on a muted note of optimism, with the government beginning to restore order and the hope that year zero might at last give way to year one. But the savagery of what we have seen, the fears of what might come to pass, remain. Panic is a nightmare as potent now as it was six decades ago.
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