‘The End’ Review

Last decade featured two of the most insightful and formally interesting documentaries in cinema: 2012’s The Act of Killing and its companion film, 2014’s The Look of Silence. Both confronted the Indonesian genocide that took place between 1965 and ‘66, with the latter focused on the grief and the victims of the mass killings. However, the former proved the most audacious and serves as a segue into Joshua Oppenheimer’s foray into narrative features. The Act of Killing follows key members of the massacre and specifically tasks those responsible for committing the acts with re-enacting the killings through the making of a film. Many documentaries cover atrocities across the world, each one grappling with the cruelty capable of humankind, but Oppenheimer’s sticks out because of how it chooses to explore that and forces the audience to wrestle with the psyche of a killer.

It comes as no surprise that Oppenheimer’s latest film, The End, circles many similar ideas put forth throughout his documentaries and does it in an unconventional manner that forces the audiences to contemplate its purpose. What will surprise most is that Oppenheimer commits to a genuinely baffling dichotomy of genres that is exhausting and puzzling: a post-apocalyptic musical chamber drama. With shades of Jacques Demy but without the emotional hook to bring audiences on board, Oppenheimer gathers an impressive cast to languish within the confines of a bunker at the end of the world. However, despite its many shortcomings, The End navigates a microcosm of delusion, legacy, and perspective to deliver a thematically rich drama that is far more fascinating than compelling.

The musical elements will likely rub many the wrong way but serve a greater purpose to Oppenheimer’s thesis. A family, simply referred to as Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton), and Son (George MacKay), have taken refuge in a bunker they’ve created after the world outside has been ruined due to climate change. Before the world's end, the Father was a key leader in the push for fossil fuel consumption and directly contributed to the Earth’s subsequent destruction. Now they live in a bubble, as his son writes a memoir of him based on his father’s perception of himself and the progress made by his work; his mother re-arranges famous paintings throughout their living space and maintains the cleanliness of the home; and the few people they brought with them serve as butlers, maids, and doctors to help ensure their bubble remains healthy and safe from the outside.

The film opens with characters singing about how great their life is together and generally continues that way. The characters' optimism and blissful ignorance of how miserable things are (or, in some cases, strained convincing that their actions on the surface were justified) cause an intended friction with the rest of the film. Why are these characters so happy? How can they be singing when they are not only forced to live in a bunker but also clearly responsible for the end of the world? However, the musical has always stretched reality to a fever pitch. One of the major complaints lobbed against musicals is that it breaks immersion. However, The End emphasizes immersion and captures people who not only live in their own perfect world but firmly believe there to be no better place (and they are right as the world above is uninhabitable). It is further accentuated by the fact that they are alone, and as such, it does not matter to them that neither can sing. They sing anyway, and the break from reality lets the characters explore their emotions through upbeat songs instead of threatening the civility kept within the home with pointed arguments and hostile accusations.

Their underground paradise is threatened, though, with the mysterious arrival of a woman (Moses Ingram) who recently lost her family and now finds herself reluctantly accepted by the Mother and Father at the behest of their son. She has survived on the surface above and wields a different perspective on the Son’s family than he is used to hearing. She is also the first woman he has gotten to have a meaningful conversation with who isn’t his mother or her best friend (Bronagh Gallagher). Her dialogue has an underlying resentment and a gentle prodding of the Son’s worldview that spreads throughout the home. However, Oppenheimer’s screenplay, co-written by Rasmus Heisterberg, keeps the naivety of the Son as the grounding tone for The End. It’s neither bleak nor perfect, but as the cracks show more, the film settles into a slightly drab aesthetic that mirrors the characters’ efforts to make the best of a terrible situation.

This does not make for an entertaining film, though. While the musical sidebars can occasionally be captivating, they are more often disappointing, overlong segments that provide interiority for the characters but little else. They stretch longer than they need to, much like the film. After all, how long can one endure watching terrible people present themselves with awards for being the best people? That deluded sense of self distills the major strife when reviewing The End - it’s not very good, but it is fascinating. Oppenheimer clearly wants audiences to understand the futility of trying to make bad people understand their actions. Just because they are shown the error of their ways does not mean they can see it as an error. Ingram’s character is an interesting wrinkle to the film, but the extent to which you can make a difference is limited when those in power can affect your narrative.

That said, The End does what it sets out to do and is surprisingly humorous throughout. Shannon and Swinton’s characters are not fun people to be around, but watching them wrestle with discomfort from a situation while trying to remain civil is quietly funny. MacKay has had some humorously complex performances in the past, most notably with Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, but his character’s arrested development here provides the levity needed to try and understand his character. MacKay himself is a little better suited for the musical numbers than Shannon and Swinton, though they all tend to pale in comparison to Ingram’s presence within each song. There’s a sturdy supporting cast behind the central four characters, all of which have their moments, but The End is at its best when MacKay is involved.

The main struggle is that The End is always distant from its audience. The jokes lean more into cringe comedy than gallows humor, and everyone rarely speaks their mind out of fear of destroying the facade of happiness. There’s a relatability there, and Oppenheimer takes the mild-mannered woman who has found her way into the home of terrible people and depicts a microcosm of society as a whole. As we quietly seethe at the decisions made by those in power and watch as the world around us burns, those decision-makers become increasingly cut off from the world around them. And while the family in The End may have decided to burrow deeper into the ground - much like their heads have been dug into the sand - they find strength in believing their actions were allowed by the society they destroyed. That perspective is difficult to present to an audience, especially when Oppenheimer’s directorial decisions are often baffling, but The End is the kind of challenging text where questioning its swings yields a deeper appreciation for its interrogation of immorality and complacency in the face of tyranny.