Dead Man's Letters (1986)

This is an utter masterpiece. I have seen many of the great post-nuclear apocalypse movies. Dead Man’s Letters captures that same bleakness you see in Threads and the Day After with a more artistic flair, yet it subtly eschews that abject hopelessness through fleeting moments of delusional hope and a tantalizing abstraction of family. We know that Eric is dead, that the main character’s desires of his survival are nothing but a coping mechanism towards the slow death of humanity; however, we hold onto this attitude of minute hope even with the aimlessness of perpetual survival. The film is about the fatalist bifurcation of this societal microcosm, in which all but the professor succumb to a feeling of innate ineffectuality. Children also serve as a reason for moral conflict, as others continuously abandon them over philosophical selfishness. Even the woman who had initially advocated for and cared for the children end up abandoning them to the professor. The professor’s humanism and guilt lead him to practically adopt the children as his own. This grants him a new purpose and exorcises the demons of the past.