It starts with a bit of television fuzz. A problem with the antenna, surely. It’s early in Lynne Littman’s 1983 film Testament, and the beginning of the end of the world—or something like it—is coming, accompanied by the starkest, most unsettling silence. There’s a fuzzy signal, and then a live news announcement: nuclear bombs are falling. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is real,” a news anchor says, before a message from the president warning people to keep phone lines clear. There’s hardly enough time for Carol Wetherly (Jane Alexander) and her children to process this news before warning becomes reality: a hot, white, blinding flash of light.

Testament is an apocalypse movie in name, but not in spirit. This is not a film about war, though surely there must be some geopolitical explanation for the nation getting hit on both coasts with nukes. The film’s focus instead is on the fallout—the radiation in the air, not the carnage you can see. It’s about the steady crawl of inexplicable mass death into peoples’ lives. It’s about the new normal.

Watch Testament:

That’s what brought the film to my mind this week, of course. But Littman’s movie, which also stars William Devane as Tom, Carol’s husband, and a small cast of neighbors and friends (including a bashful pair of actors named Rebecca De Mornay and Kevin Costner, neither of whom was a star yet), is notable on its own terms, not only in our own, newly tragic context. It is notable for being as staid as it is sentimental.

It is no spoiler to reveal that Carol’s husband dies in that nuclear fallout, far from his family; nor is it a spoiler to reveal that the film flies through the family’s sudden change in circumstance too swiftly, and with too much intelligence, to fall into the trap of letting its characters languish while pining for dad to come home. That’s Testament’s power. It is steeped in mourning, in the reality of incomprehensible loss, but it is also unforgivingly rigorous in its depiction of life having to move on. Children die. Spouses die. Radiation has suffused the air. That, again, is the new normal.

The movie was adapted by John Sacret Young from a three-page short story by a California school teacher, Carol Amen, who died a few years after the film’s release. It was originally produced for PBS’s American Playhouse, but it got a theatrical release through Paramount; because of that, it qualified for Academy Awards, earning Alexander a best actress nomination. But in the tradition of some of the most notable films about nuclear fallout, this movie was made for home audiences.

The charge that this film has the humble patina of a “TV movie”—an insult levied by critics and others at the time—is in fact perfectly apt. It explains the smallness of this production; it isn’t a stretch to say that the lack of crash-bang disaster theatrics might have something to do with the film’s budget. As it happens, Testament is all the better for this smallness. And, for me, all the more devastating.

Last weekend I attended a virtual wake for a relative who died of COVID earlier this month. The experience was strange; how could it have been anything but? Open, fearless mourning, unfettered outpourings of emotion are always a little surreal for a bystander—and even for participants, in those brief moments of clarity in which, suddenly, you can hear your own wails. Mourning violates the norms of composure that regulate our everyday lives.