The Quiet Earth

A scientist named Zac Hobson wakes one morning to find that nearly every other living creature on Earth has vanished without explanation. Cars roll into ditches, planes fall from the sky, and no trace of the missing population remains. Zac comes to suspect that a top-secret energy experiment he helped run is responsible, and as the emptiness wears on him, his grip on reality begins to slip. He is not entirely alone, however: he eventually encounters two other survivors, Joanne and Api, and together they face the question of what happened and what, if anything, can be undone.

The Quiet Earth is a 1985 New Zealand science fiction drama directed by Geoff Murphy, made early in his feature career and the earliest of the five titles listed for him. Bruno Lawrence, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Bill Baer and Sam Pillsbury, plays Zac, with Alison Routledge as Joanne and Pete Smith as Api; Sam Pillsbury and Don Reynolds produced. It runs 91 minutes and was made for about 1 million US dollars.

Reception was steady across sources: on IMDb it holds 6.7/10 from around 29,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.6/10 from 659 votes. A critics' rating of 6.9/10 from 17 reviews places professional appraisal slightly above the audience scores on both platforms, suggesting a film that reviewers regarded a little more warmly than the general viewing public did.