When the young Ken Elkin (Noah Taylor), a sex-crazed and hyperactive youth with a taste for the melodrama, first encounters the end of the world, it is at the annual Seventh Day Adventist Camp in 1956. Convinced by an eloquent heretic that all Adventists are to burn in Hell the following Saturday, Elkin fears that his true love for the pastor's daughter will never be consummated. But the world doesn't end....Arriving in Sydney in 1962 to attend university, Elkin encounters the world's end for a second time while besieging the wealthy and beautiful Jennie O'Brien (Miranda Otto) with his misguided affection. Believing that with the Cuban missile crisis the end is truly nigh, the paranoid Elkin persuades Jennie to flee Sydney for the safety of the nearby mountains. But the much anticipated apocalypse is once again fails to appear and now he must face the wrath of Jennie's father.