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Zack Snyder’s ‘The Last Photograph’ Gets Brutal First Reactions Out of TIFF As the Worst Film of His Career

ByHrvoje Milakovic Published on
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Zack Snyder has spent the past few years bouncing between massive studio franchises and increasingly personal side projects, and ‘The Last Photograph’ sits firmly in the latter camp. The film has been gestating since the mid-2000s, surviving multiple false starts, cast changes, and a lengthy detour through his DC and Rebel Moon years before finally reaching a screen.

Unlike Snyder’s recent blockbusters, this one arrived without a studio behind it. He self-financed the project, shot it himself as cinematographer, and brought it to the Toronto International Film Festival as an acquisition title still searching for a distributor, with Stuart Martin and Fra Fee starring as an ex-DEA agent and a war photographer navigating the South American jungle in search of the agent’s kidnapped niece and nephew.

That gamble collided with reality almost immediately once the film screened. Critic Matt Neglia offered one of the sharper assessments, writing that while Snyder clearly believes he’s made something more profound and artful than his previous work, the result plays as a tedious, frustrating, and grueling experience, calling it easily the worst film he’d seen at the festival so far.

He wasn’t alone. Other attendees used words like “dogshit,” “abysmal,” and “an embarrassment” to describe the screening, with several critics comparing it unfavorably to Snyder’s own prior work and to films like ‘Apocalypse Now’ that clearly inspired its tone. More than one reaction noted that Snyder had joked before the screening that this might be the only time the film is ever shown to an audience, a line that landed differently after the credits rolled.

Complaints largely centered on pacing and excess. Multiple reactions pointed to a film that runs well over two hours, packed with slow motion, violence, and heavy-handed dialogue, with several critics arguing a tighter cut buried somewhere inside it could have worked far better than what actually screened.

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The reception wasn’t universally negative, even if the loudest reactions were brutal ones. Deadline’s review described the film as a violent but surprisingly human action drama, praising the visuals Snyder shot himself and finding Stuart Martin more convincing in the lead role than some of the harsher social media reactions suggested, while comparing the film’s tone closer to Peter Weir’s ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ than to the culture-war action films it was being lumped in with elsewhere.

A handful of other attendees landed somewhere in between, praising the film’s cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s score even while acknowledging its narrative stumbles. One reviewer awarded it three stars, calling it a stunning and staggering realization of a passion project Snyder had chased for decades, even as plenty of others in the same theater walked away calling it one of the worst films to ever premiere at the festival.

‘The Last Photograph’ still has no distributor as of the TIFF premiere, and the film’s reception inside the theater is unlikely to make that search any easier. Snyder addressed the crowd himself before the screening, calling the festival home to some of the greatest cinema audiences in the world and describing the project as a genuine labor of love nearly two decades in the making.

Whether that love translates into a theatrical release remains to be seen, especially with buyers reportedly already wary of the film’s violence and modest production value well before this round of reactions went public. For a director whose entire career has been defined by the gap between critical scorn and audience affection, this latest round of reviews feels less like a departure and more like a continuation of a pattern that has followed him since his earliest studio features.

What Do You Think of the Brutal Reactions to Zack Snyder’s The Last Photograph?

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