As Freud said, the feeling of melancholy is often accompanied by a sense of the end, of the apocalypse. This is even more true when it is the artists who are pervaded by melancholy. The most striking example is Leopardi and his Ginestra; thus, in this short film of just over 15 minutes, the poets of a not too distant future pour into the street, at the dawn of the most violent storm in history. They come into contact with humanity, trying to make it participate in poetry. The intellectual "class", Lav Diaz has stated several times, must not hide within the four walls of education, inside schools or other buildings. Intellectuals must speak face to face with the people, they must educate them, if they really hope to change the world.And so it happens in The Day Before the End, the words of the poets, the words of Shakespeare propagate through the crowded streets of a typical Philippine town. But the people do not look at them as a student looks at the teacher but, rather, as the public looks at a clown: with interest, yes, but this is only an interest in entertainment, not in culture. However, the narrative in this short is absent. It is a human puzzle of people condemned to disaster, of people waiting for the end. Diaz's stylistic signature remains, the duration is the true protagonist of the short. What is missing is the structural coherence, obviously dictated by the brevity of the work, which is so enigmatic and obscure. Because what Lav Diaz sought is not the narrative, in this short, it is not the story (neither the one with a lowercase "s" nor the one with a capital letter) but it is the atmosphere. The Day Before the End is the portrait of the future end of a country that has always been on the brink of self-destruction, a country tormented by nature and the power of its rulers. And so, in this near future, the end comes. And it is an end that brings relief, like death: it is an end that makes the torment cease. And so the storm comes. It submerges the city. That same storm, which is described in the last, cryptic words, becomes a sort of savior both natural and supernatural: in Philippine popular beliefs, the elements are always personified, as already shown in From What Is Before by Diaz himself, and so the storm, at least in the official English subtitles, is not "it" but "he".