‘The End’ Review: Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Sing for Their Lives in Joshua Oppenheimer’s Post-Apocalyptic Musical
It’s a classic story prompt: The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s delirious and delicately monumental “The End,” the man is an über-affluent family. The “door” (so to speak) connects the scorched ruins of our planet to the cavernous underground bunker where these characters have buried themselves for the last 25 years. The knock reverberates with a force powerful enough to dislodge all the feelings they’ve worked so hard to bury along with them — the humanity they’ve had to deny somewhere deep within themselves in order to make peace with the humanity they chose to leave behind on the surface.
Despite the broad familiarity of its premise, however, this story doesn’t unfold like any post-apocalyptic fable before it. For one thing, it’s a full-throated musical that starts with Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton leading the rest of the survivors in a forced smile of a song about the brightness of their shared future. For another, a traditional plot — the kind often predicated upon the discovery that “the last man on Earth” is much less alone than he thought — never really threatens to materialize, even if the film’s characters are seen preparing for that scenario through a series of amusingly theatrical fire drills.
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Best known for his pair of soul-excavating documentaries about the Indonesian genocide, Oppenheimer isn’t the least bit interested in suspense. The title of his first narrative feature is meant to be taken at face value, and even the script’s most basic questions (e.g. “what happened?,” “what’s going to happen next?”) are never as urgent or centrally framed as the reasons why its characters reluctance to ask them. The rare moments when “The End” invites us to guess at what its characters might do invariably serve to redirect our attention to the infinite mystery of why its characters do anything.
In that sense, Oppenheimer’s all-singing, some-dancing subterranean epic isn’t the wild pivot that it might seem to represent for its maker, but rather a perfectly natural reprise of the primordial darkness he dug up in “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence.” While a bit lighter and less gutting in its forcible reconciliation of past and present, biblical guilt and pathological self-delusion (this is still a work of fiction after all, at least for now), “The End” is nevertheless another bold and unblinking examination of how people live with themselves when so many others have died for their sins — of the artifice inherent to any future built upon, or underneath, the mass graveyard of an atrocity. The harmonies only highlight the cognitive dissonance that allows these characters to get out of bed every morning.
For a film whose slow-accumulating power doesn’t fully sink in until its final moments (a sweet refrain that’s all the more arresting for its anticlimactic conviction), “The End” doesn’t waste any time to put its cards on the table. The world as we know it is over. Something — or a chain reaction of somethings, most of them presumably climate-related — has spread across the surface of the Earth, destabilizing human civilization and making our planet unlivable. Shit is so bad that Oppenheimer eschews any glimpse of the devastation in favor of a T.S. Eliot quote.
Of course, such horrors are all too easy to forget about for the family who’s been hiding from them in an underground fortress somewhere below the bones of old Salem (which Salem is never specified, though Oppenheimer’s crucible reverberates with the faintest echoes of 17th century Massachusetts). These people aren’t preppers surviving on expired tins of SPAM in an underlit cavern, they’re high-society elites who seem to have carved a mansion from the chalky bowels of a salt mine, and while Oppenheimer’s steady camera frequently glides from the dining room of the house to the darkness of the oblivion that surrounds in a single fluid motion (so that it feels as if his characters are trapped in a set on a soundstage), the illusion is often convincing enough to forget its context. Or at least it would be if not for the filtration system that runs underneath the tunnels, evoking the sandworms of Arrakis as it funnels air from one chamber to another.
Mother (Swinton) and Father (Shannon) probably don’t even notice it anymore. So far as their pasty-faced 25-year-old Son (George MacKay) is concerned, this is just what normal looks like. He was born in the bunker, a blank slate whose perfectly timed arrival encouraged his parents to tell him about the world above on their own terms. The truth is no more verifiable than myth. The Mother was a ballet dancer at the Bolshoi and the Father made his billions in the fossil fuel business, but the Son has no reason not to believe him when he says that “we’ll never know if our industry contributed to the collapse.”
At this point, it’s possible the Father has sold himself on the same lie; he only kept the positive newspaper clippings, and the memoir that he and his son are writing together is such an effective way of massaging the truth it hardly seems to matter that no one is alive to read it (of all the members of this family, Dad is the best at not thinking about such things). The other people in the bunker might know enough to hold him accountable, but they’re all bound together by the geometry of a non-violent Mexican standoff — everyone remembers the awful things that each of them are so desperate to forget, and their co-existence is predicated upon a mutual agreement to accept the fantasy.
In “The End,” that fantasy is naturally made real through song. Doubling down on the theatricality of “The Act of Killing,” Oppenheimer fully commits to the bit here, peppering the movie with upbeat but samey musical numbers that range from gentle asides to exuberant declarations (MacKay gets the closest thing this movie has to a showstopper, the sequence achieving uncharacteristic energy with the help of Mikhail Krichman’s slapstick choreography). Composers Josh Schmidt and Marius de Vries set the tone with a springy overture awash with strings and clarinets, and the rest of the score holds fast to that sense of denial.
The songs themselves grip it even tighter, as their lyrics and instrumentation combine to suggest a heightened take on the sort of ditties that a regular person might sing to themselves in order to forget that every legitimate musician on the planet has been killed in a nuclear holocaust (or whatever). The music allows us to buy into the delusion of the film’s premise, and the delusion of the film’s premise allows us to appreciate the music for what it is in return — to hear Swinton’s reedy timbre as a feature not a bug, and delight in the unexpected pleasures of listening to Shannon’s voice crack as he warbles about the love that keeps his family alive. Unlike in “Dancer in the Dark,” where the ecstasy of the songs was used to underscore the misery of everything else, these numbers feel like a natural extension of the movie around them, which is generally somber but never grim enough to reflect the truth of the situation.
The movie’s philosophy reflects that of the Son, even when he fades into the chorus for a long stretch in the second half. A hyper-naive manboy whose entire ethos is cobbled together from borrowed knowledge, the Son is aware that Chinese immigrants built the Central Pacific Railroad, but he paints the abused laborers with smiles on their faces in the massive diorama he’s making with his father. He would almost seem to be a perfect innocent if not for the unavoidable entitlement of his existence. Comfort and safety are all that he’s ever known, and the idea that he might not deserve such things more than anyone less fortunate has never been part of the equation.
That dynamic is richly expressed — and tested — through the hierarchy of gratitude that has persisted in the bunker all these years, with the Mother’s best friend (a heartbreaking Bronagh Gallagher) dutifully serving as chef and housemaid as a thank you for being spared from armageddon. The same is true of the family’s gay weapons master (Tim McInnerny doing Bill Murray) and resident doctor (a wonderfully bitter Lennie James, playing the film’s only Brit).
But the mental gymnastics required to justify his place in the house’s pecking order — and in the history of our species beyond that — have clearly left its mark on Son. Mapping the pains of being pure of heart as brilliantly as he did in “The Beast,” MacKay seizes on the Gollum-esque duality that Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg have written into the role (the Son has a snarling tendency to call things “cocksuckers” when no one else is around), and his moral character becomes a veritable battleground for the future of humanity when a new bombshell enters the villa.
The Woman (Moses Ingram) appears out of the blue one day, absent a name, a companion, or just about anything else aside from a sob story about the choice she made to abandon her family. She’s the first stranger to enter the family’s bunker in 20 years, and her presence stirs up a flurry of conflicted feelings about the proper balance between fear and safety; right from the start, “The End” is ruthlessly attuned to the cruelties that people will allow themselves in the interest of protecting their own. Having kids is the most beautiful thing in the world, but it also breeds an unbreakable narcissism.
The Woman is as gracious as can be, but it’s not her fault that everyone else is put on edge by her arrival. Her mere existence is enough to trigger the Son’s dormant horniness (and inspire classic dreams of running away together), and her Blackness seems to subtly offset the boy’s Mother in a way that suggests our species might somehow be outlived by its biases. The script doesn’t put too fine a point on that, instead leaving us to wonder why no one mentions the sudden possibility of repopulation. Is it just that this aesthetics-obsessed rich housewife — who hates subtlety because “you always have to rediscover it” — can’t fathom the idea of a non-white grandchild, or has the family’s solipsism grown so pronounced that continuing the human race no longer concerns them?
Indeed, the real threat the Woman poses to these people is that the sheer reality of her presence bends settled history back into unresolved questions, and forces the family into direct contact with the most deeply repressed parts of themselves in the process (the post-traumatic honesty of Ingram’s performance creates a rich and tetchy contrast with her character’s delusional new hosts). Did they really “have no choice” about who they chose to save with their money, or is our singular gift for self-absolution about to face its ultimate test? Ambiently fact-checking the stories these people have been telling themselves and each other since the apocalypse, the Woman unwittingly assumes the same role that Oppenheimer served in his docs — a connection formalized by the scene in which she inspires someone to retch up their guilt.
In lieu of any clear and present dangers, “The End” sustains itself by interrogating these layers of guilt with the forensic detail of a post-mortem, and the shifting matrix of guilt and shame that it uncovers grows increasingly rewarding to map as the movie goes along. (The sooner you stop asking yourself what will happen, the sooner you can begin to sit with the distress that this story was over before it even began.) Drastic action is always threatened but seldom realized, and — in a clever twist on musical tradition — the songs are often used to return these characters to their emotional baselines rather than as a conduit for them to express their biggest feelings. Sometimes, they even sing together, as if that harmony might soften the fact that everyone with the power to forgive them is long dead. In such a hermetically sealed echo chamber, it’s possible these people might do some good by choosing to forgive each other. But there’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.
By telling a story about such broadly invented characters, Oppenheimer is free to implicate the rest of the world along with them. The family we meet here is far from average, but the scale of their sins is all too recognizable when shrunk down to fit the film’s sets. While “The End” won’t trigger any of the same controversy that confronted last year’s “The Zone of Interest” (which also borrowed from “The Act of Killing”), the film is similarly damning, and topical, and damning for being topical in how it traces the finite limits of human compassion.
Only here, in an equally tunnel-visioned microcosm of mass evil, the apathy on display is made all the more discomforting by the various attempts to explain it. Were these people always sociopaths, or have they simply chosen to perform the part in order to survive the crushing weight of their own guilt? “The End” doesn’t offer the instant gratification of a typical musical, but this film burrows into your head like it’s digging a doomsday behind your eyes because it so powerfully underscores how our sensitivities can be every bit as dementedly inhumane as our indifference. “We feel too much,” the Father says, “even for our mistakes.”
Grade: A-
“The End” premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters.
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