Two years after the death of the Icelandic film composer Jhann Jhannsson, his only movie as director has become available in the UK on streaming platforms. It is a 70-minute cine-novella or essay film: a meditation on humanitys future and what it means, or will mean, to be post-human.

The score is by Jhannsson, working with sound artist and composer Yair Elazar Glotman, and this eerie, breathy soundtrack works well with its unearthly images. Last and First Men is inspired by the 1930 novel of the same name by British SF author William Olaf Stapledon, narrated by a figure from humanitys final evolutionary form billions of years in the future. This voice is performed with crisp lack of affect by Tilda Swinton.

The visual images Jhannsson finds to accompany this prose-poem are strange and disturbing sculptures that look like something built on Earth by aliens, a mix of Stonehenge and Angkor Wat. I wondered if Jhannsson had had them designed and built. In fact, these are the brutalist Spomeniks, the socialist-era monuments in former Yugoslavia, mostly in remote windswept landscapes, built in the 1950s and 60s to commemorate the tragedy of the war and the resistance to fascism; they are truly strange in their fierce, concrete giganticism, and have a cult following.

By detaching them from their historical context, Jhansson finds something very unsettling in these sculptures: they really do look like creations from the future, not the past. Last and First Men is an interesting if minor work, perhaps comparable to Nikolaus Geyrhalters Homo Sapiens or Michael Madsens Into Eternity.

Last and First Men is available on BFI Player from 30 July.

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Last and First Men review eerie sounds and unearthly images from a posthuman world - The Guardian