In The Act of Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer took the documentary form in an unimaginably radical way, inviting his characters—Indonesian gangsters who once served in the country’s death squads—to reenact their crimes for the camera. Why should his first feature film be more conventional?
In “The End,” Oppenheimer envisions a bizarre musical set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which a group of elites are trapped in an underground bunker where they have collected expensive art and wine for a catastrophe they may have caused. Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about “a very wealthy, very dangerous family” (as he put it), but he ultimately chose to take the project in a very different direction.
With its long running time of 148 minutes and lack of compelling conflicts, “The End” does not satisfy mainstream sensibilities. On the contrary, Oppenheimer appeals to arthouse audiences with serious meditations on guilt and the human capacity to justify one’s wrongdoings. The filmmaker planned the project before the Covid-19 pandemic, but somehow failed to take into account the fact that audiences are tired of suffocating stories of closure.
The resulting fairy tale would certainly have benefited from some suspense—for example, an element of suspense that threatens the tight-knit group of survivors—but Oppenheimer stubbornly resists such compromises. Ultimately, The End is not a musical as we might imagine, but a sophisticated drama punctuated by original songs that are (less somber than you might imagine) written by Oppenheimer and then set to music by Joshua Schmidt (a playwright making his big-screen debut).
The experience begins innocently enough, with a bright-eyed 20-year-old (George MacKay) who can’t remember life before lockdown, playing around with a grossly inaccurate diorama (with Indians, settlers and slaves coexisting at the foot of the Hollywood sign) and singing sweetly to himself. He could be like Ariel in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” confused about who and what mammals she has, naively dreaming of life on the surface. Like the dawn, “A Perfect Morning” makes a great opening number, though MacKay’s voice, like the rest of the cast, doesn’t sound trained to sing. Perhaps Oppenheimer wanted it to be that way.
The young man, identified only as “his son,” was born in this doomsday-like bunker and knows no other reality, though his parents have spent the past two decades regurgitating their own self-serving version of events. His mother (Tilda Swinton) remembers her time at the Bolshoi, though it’s doubtful she ever put on a show. “We’ll never know if our industry contributed to global warming,” says his father, an energy baron (Michael Shannon), who is clearly in denial about the world they left behind—the world they helped destroy.
Here, safe from whatever horrors have befallen humanity, the boy's parents have preserved whatever cultural sense they can, aided by a personal physician (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInerney), a maid (Danielle Ryan) and an old friend (Bronagh Gallagher) from those earlier times. The mother spends her days rearranging the precious artworks on the walls – including Renoir's “Dancer,” Monet's “Woman with a Parasol” and a stunning, vast landscape – and paying attention to details like cracks in the plaster.
It’s been twenty years since they retreated to this self-contained bunker, and any notions of “normality” have long since become irrelevant. They celebrate all the holidays “religiously,” and throw silly little shows. Otherwise, “every day feels like it’s the last,” Swinton sings nearly two hours later, as part of her devastating (if raucous) single “Dear Mama.” Their routine includes swimming lessons and emergency drills, as survival is their priority—but to what end?
This seems to be the driving question of “The End,” which implies that people like this would have been better off preventing the end of the world than planning it. For a while, the film plays like a sad song at the end of a disaster movie, with seven characters surviving while the rest of the world perishes. And then what? The boy was raised in their image by his parents, made into a chronicler of their distorted reality while warning him of the danger of “outsiders.”
Then comes a girl, identified only as “Girl” (Muse Ingram). She expresses guilt about abandoning her family, which in turn stirs up long-suppressed feelings in others who made impossible sacrifices during the early days of the end. “Mom, did you see the people trying to come in?” her now-incredulous son asks. Questions like these are not only uncomfortable for the family, they also reflect the generational divide now unfolding in America, where young people find it difficult to forgive their parents’ actions.
The mother has no intention of letting this stranger in. “We have to draw a line somewhere,” she says. Long ago, they killed people for trying, and the servant bears the scars to show for it. But twenty years is a long time without news of the outside world, and the family cautiously allows the girl into their bubble. Aside from McKay, who brings a touching form of sweetness to the role, Ingram is the only member of the group who shows hope. The others all suggest the dried-up husks of humanity, keeping up appearances as best they can. Surely, whatever the audience has experienced during the pandemic will inform how they deal with the intruder, though Oppenheimer approaches it with cautious optimism.
Teaming up with Melancholia’s production designer Jette Lehmann, Oppenheimer presents a sleek, drab bunker, buried deep in a salt mine but built for comfort—not unlike the Elon Musk-inspired base seen in last year’s Murder at the End of the World , a project that delivers its big ideas through effective genre devices. Oppenheimer would have done well to adopt a similar approach, though his resistance to such choices earns The End a capitalist arthouse (at the expense of capitalist entertainment) stamp.
Who will see “The End”? The film, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, seems doomed to fail, but it has the support of critics and audiences who rightly feel that such a risk is worth encouraging. Oppenheimer’s audacity (and that of his supporters) should be commended, but its depiction of a certain form of bizarre idiocy can’t help it feel idiocy in itself. Before a musical finds its way to Broadway, it undergoes a process of testing and rehearsal until it finally becomes a musical. This one seems to have skipped those steps with ease, trusting its creator’s vision over the needs of its audience.
We may never see another film like “The End,” and that alone makes it special, though everyone involved in it would surely love to see it. In fact, the film seems like a mysterious message, hidden in plain sight, waiting only for the bravest researchers to uncover it.
