The End review – Joshua Oppenheimer’s end-of-days musical is ambitious and exhausting
The singing isn’t very good in The End but that’s not really a bad thing.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s intermittently fascinating and exhausting post-apocalyptic musical, starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, is about a family sheltered by their own insidious privilege, trying to maintain a cheery disposition despite the grim circumstances that surround them. The world has essentially burned to the ground. Shannon’s former energy sector executive minimizes the role he played in that. The safety they’ve secured for themselves deep down in a salt mine has come with costly human sacrifice (not theirs, mind you). So when they’re belting out show tunes about how the “future is bright”, voices crackling across a melody that has a few too many down notes, they’re not exactly selling us – or themselves – on the alternate reality they’ve built in their own minds. Oppenheimer’s musical refuses to indulge the escapism we usually count on the genre for.
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The documentary film-maker, making his narrative feature debut, isn’t new to the performances people put on as denialism. The End is an extension of that thought experiment he executed in The Act Of Killing. His brilliant and chilling 2012 film observes the men responsible for genocide in Indonesia as they re-enact their violent crimes against humanity, using genre storytelling – like the film noir or the musical – as a layer of protection from their complicity. While The Act of Killing explores how people in the present reframe the inhumanity of the past, The End is about how the privileged will struggle to live with themselves in the future for what’s being committed now.
Shannon’s dad – the characters are identified by their position within or in relation to the nuclear family at its centre – has various takes on his innocence as far as climate disaster goes. He repeats all too familiar phrases, explaining that he tried to “make a difference”, while also meeting society’s needs; arguing that if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else; and declaring that it’s arrogant to think that just one individual could have any real impact.
He’s mainly performing for an audience of one: his son played by George MacKay, a blank slate born in the bunker 25 years before, whose very peculiar behaviour, and ideas of what the world was, can be chalked up to being raised in a Plato’s cave his parents curated specifically for him. The delusions he grows up with are immediately obvious when the son exhibits his diorama of America, featuring imported Chinese railroad workers who have smiles on their faces, because he believes they were happy committing themselves to something meaningful. McKay is fabulous in this wound-up performance, grasping the inner tension between the son’s entitlement and curiosity. He also exhibits the most laugh-out-loud dance moves, choreographed in isolation after all, clearly with no help from Swinton’s mom, who claims to be a former ballerina.
She’s a frantic and uptight presence, struggling to maintain her composure and emotional balance. Mom tries to uphold the family’s refusal to allow outsiders beyond her best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), doctor (Lennie James) and butler (Tim McInnerny) into their underground fortress. It’s a matter of principle, often enforced at gunpoint. She left behind her own family to survive, after all, so the idea that anyone else can enter the salt mine and consume their limited resources threatens to break her. Swinton is spectacular in moments where her mom is quivering with anger but singing right through it to keep up with the musical charades.
The cruel joke is that the family, whose words often ring hollow, talk about being frugal for the sake of their survival but indulge an insatiable appetite. They eat fabulously. They dwell on the finishes in their cavernous and elegantly appointed digs, which includes an art gallery, library and an indoor pool where they swim laps, racing to break their own record times because there’s no one else left for them to compete with.
The material stuff that they hoard and consume isn’t enough. They also co-opt narratives, as when they make historical events about themselves. At one point, Shannon’s dad listens to McInnerny’s butler recall a vulnerable moment that leaves the latter’s palms sweating. The dad, who perhaps never knew such a moment, later recites the same story as if it were his own.
Moses Ingram’s survivor crashes the party, a destabilizing presence, who forces the family to choke on their lies. The film really gets going during a comically cordial dinner that goes off the rails. The family had just attempted to murder the intruder, but instead decided a companion for their son, who shall inherit the future, may not be a bad thing. During the dinner, Ingram calls out how sour the wine is. That’s the first bitter truth she confronts the family with. The way Shannon and Swinton hilariously squirm in response to such moments, while trying to maintain their decorum, make The End’s oppressively long runtime easier to swallow.
At two and a half hours, Oppenheimer’s strange and ambitious deconstruction of human behaviour – with its bleak but adorning visuals and its novel spin on ideas we’ve seen in The Hunger Games and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth – can also be draining. Maybe that’s intentional. We’re getting a taste of the punishing monotony these characters live out in scenes that are intentionally redundant, like the singing and dancing numbers that has them circling the same confined spaces.
But there’s hubris to a film that hoards screentime in the same way its characters do resources. It’s as if The End doesn’t seem to mind consuming what little time we may have left.
The End is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in US cinemas on 6 December with a UK release date to be announced
