Like the romance it portrays, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is brief, sweet, funny and sad. It’s also tonally uncertain and occasionally foolish, but somehow these flaws never derail the story’s wistful pleasures, not the least of which — if we ignore an unpleasant speech by Patton Oswalt — is its pleasing lack of the frat-boy vulgarity that has come to define so much of the genre.
Even when wobbling dangerously between tragedy and comedy, Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay (she also directed) resists the lifeline of cheap-and-cheesy: She’d rather end a scene with a question mark than a dirty laugh.
Brevity is the film’s mantra and driving force — specifically, if an asteroid were scheduled to pulverize your planet in exactly 21 days, how would you spend your time?
It’s a fascinating question that Scafaria never fully explores, mainly because she’s not that kind of filmmaker.
Hers is a microview: Like her 2008 script for the charming Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which unspooled over the course of one tune-filled night, Seeking a Friend filters big themes through the lens of a single, tentative relationship.