With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer took a radical, seemingly unthinkable approach to the documentary form, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served in the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes for the camera. Why should his narrative debut be more conventional?
For ‘The End’, Oppenheimer devises a strange post-apocalyptic musical, confined to an underground bunker where an elite group of people have hoarded fine art and expensive wines for a catastrophe that, perversely, they may have caused. Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about a “very rich, very dangerous family” (in his words), but ultimately chose to take the project in a completely different direction.
With its turgid 148-minute running time and defiant lack of compelling conflict, “The End” doesn’t appeal to mainstream sensibilities. Instead, Oppenheimer appeals to the arthouse crowd with some serious consideration of guilt and the human ability to rationalize away one’s misdeeds. The filmmaker conceived the project before the COVID-19 pandemic, but somehow failed to consider the fact that audiences have had enough of claustrophobic lockdown stories.
The resulting fable would undoubtedly have benefited from some kind of tension – for example, a thriller element that threatens the tight-knit group of survivors – but Oppenheimer stubbornly resists such concessions. Ultimately, ‘The End’ is less of a musical than we might imagine, but a clever highbrow drama interspersed with melancholic original songs (less than you might think), written by Oppenheimer and then set to music by Joshua Schmidt (a theater composer who debut on the big screen).
The experience starts innocently enough, with a bright-eyed twenty-year-old (George MacKay) who can’t remember life before the lockdown, tinkering with a blatantly inaccurate diorama (he has Indians, colonists and slaves coexisting on the foot of the lockdown). the Hollywood sign) and sings sweetly to herself. He could be Ariel in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” marveling at her whozits and whatzits galore, and naively daydreaming about life on the surface. Like Dawn, “A Perfect Morning” makes for a beautiful opening number, though MacKay’s voice, like the rest of the cast, doesn’t sound trained to sing. Maybe Oppenheimer wanted it that way.
The young man, identified simply as ‘Son’, was born into this doomsday scenario and knows no other reality, although his parents have spent the past twenty years repeating their selfish version of events. Mother (Tilda Swinton) reminisces about her time at the Bolshoi, although it is doubtful whether she ever performed. “We will never know if our industry contributed to rising temperatures,” says his energy baron father (Michael Shannon), in clear denial of the world they left behind – a world they helped destroy.
Down here, safe from all the horrors that befell humanity, the boy’s parents have preserved as much of a sense of culture as they could, with the help of a personal doctor (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInnerny), a maid (Danielle Ryan). ) and an old man. friend (Bronagh Gallagher) from those earlier times. Mother spends her days rearranging the priceless works of art on the walls—including Renoir’s “The Dancer,” Monet’s “Woman With a Parasol” and awe-inspiring, enormous landscapes—and fussing over details like cracks in the plaster.
It’s been twenty years since they retreated to this self-sufficient bunker, and any idea of ”normalcy” has long since become irrelevant. They celebrate all holidays ‘religiously’ and organize small, absurd parades. Otherwise, “every day feels just like the last,” Swinton sings nearly two hours later, as part of her crushing (albeit shrill) “Dear Mom” solo. Their routines include swimming lessons and emergency drills, because survival is their priority – but to what end?
That seems to be the central question of “The End,” which implies that these types of people would have done better to prevent the apocalypse than to plan for it. For a while, the film plays like the extended womp-womp of a sad trombone at the end of a disaster movie, in which seven characters make it out while the rest of the world ends. What then? Mother and father raised the boy in their own image, turning him into a historian because of their twisted truth, while warning him of the danger of “strangers.”
And then someone arrives, identified only as “Girl” (Moses Ingram). She expresses her guilt for abandoning her family, which in turn brings out long-suppressed emotions in the others, who made impossible sacrifices in the first days of the end. “Mom, did you see the people trying to get in at the beginning?” her now skeptical son asks. Such questions are not only difficult for the family, but also reflect the generational schism now unfolding in America, as young people find their parents’ actions difficult to forgive.
Mother had no intention of letting this outsider in. “We have to draw the line somewhere,” she says. Long ago they killed people for trying, and the butler bears the scars to show for it. But twenty years is a long time without news from the outside world, and the family cautiously allows the girl into their bubble. Aside from MacKay, who brings a touching kind of sweetness to the role, Ingram is the only member of the ensemble who shows hope. The others all suggest the dried-out husks of humanity and keep up appearances as best they can. Whatever the public has experienced during the pandemic will certainly shape how they process the intrusion, though Oppenheimer approaches it with cautious optimism.
Together with ‘Melancholia’ production designer Jette Lehmann, Oppenheimer presents an elegantly colorless bunker, buried deep in a salt mine but built for comfort – not unlike the Elon Musk-inspired base seen last year in ‘A Murder at the End of the World ‘. ‘a project that delivers its big-brained ideas through effective genre devices. Oppenheimer would have done well to take a similar approach, although his opposition to such choices earns ‘The End’ the imprimatur of capital-A art (at the expense of capitalist entertainment).
Who’s going to see ‘The End’? Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival, the film feels destined to flop, while also being championed by critics and audiences who rightly believe such risks should be encouraged. Oppenheimer’s daring (and that of his followers) is to be commended, although his portrait of a certain, very idiosyncratic form of folly can itself feel foolish. Before a musical makes its way to Broadway, it is workshopped and tested within an inch of its lifespan. This one seems to have gone beyond such steps, trusting the creator’s vision with the needs of his audience.
There may never be another film like ‘The End’, and that alone makes it special, although everyone involved would prefer it to be seen. As it is, the film feels like a stump message, hiding in plain sight, waiting for intrepid seekers to unearth it.
