About

A meet-cute at a museum. A promise of a date. A failed alarm clock and a frenzied belated dash to the agreed pick-up point. The opening scenes of Miracle Mile play out like another '80s romantic comedy. It is not until the protagonist, musician Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards), picks up a ringing payphone and takes a panicked phone call from a man claiming to be stationed in a missile silo that things turn dark. The man on the other end of the line has dialed the wrong number while trying to reach his father to tell him that nuclear war is going to break out in just over an hour.

And so begins Harry's frantic race against time to find the woman he fell for that afternoon and escape the West Coast of America. Outside of Takeshi Miike's Audition 1999, no other piece of cinema wrenches a seemingly earnest tale of romance down such a twisted path.

One of only two films directed by Steve De Jarnatt, Miracle Mile has a strikingly unusual tone – blackly comic, palm-sweatingly tense, yet still a humane character drama. It is the story of two people consumed by a global catastrophe; the personal amidst the apocalyptic. The film has built a storied cult reputation over the years and it is easy to see why. Buoyed by a synth-heavy Tangerine Dream soundtrack, it is clearly the single vision of a filmmaker innately compelled to tell the story of these two characters trying to find love together on the eve of nuclear Armageddon.