The End – first-look review

To make his fea­ture doc­u­men­tary debut The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppen­heimer enlist­ed sur­viv­ing per­pe­tra­tors of the Indone­sian state mur­der cam­paign of 1965 – 66 — thugs, tor­tur­ers, killers — to dis­cuss and re-enact the crimes they car­ried out against their coun­try­men, neigh­bours, and even fam­i­ly members. 

The film and its sequel, The Look of Silence, were renowned por­traits of polit­i­cal impuni­ty and the com­plic­i­ty of every­day peo­ple in scarce­ly imag­in­able sadism and exploita­tion — an inter­est Oppen­heimer con­tin­ues to pur­sue in his fea­ture-length fic­tion debut, The End, albeit by oth­er means. Set entire­ly in an under­ground bunker com­plex, about a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry post-apoc­a­lypse, the film explores sur­vivor guilt aris­ing from the accu­mu­la­tion of finite resources. And it’s a musical.

Sev­er­al years in the mak­ing, and pre­ced­ed by frame-fill­ing title cards dis­play­ing the logos and names of dozens of fund­ing bod­ies and exec­u­tive pro­duc­ers, the film takes place entire­ly under­ground, deep in a salt mine; the cav­ernous set, with its white pow­dery whorls and ridges extend­ing far off in a per­pet­u­al twi­light, seems to have been the biggest expense. Inside the cold, cozy bunker, the walls are the blue-gray col­ors of the unseen sky, and in large part cov­ered with paint­ings by Renoir and oth­er mas­ters from across the total­i­ty of art his­to­ry. Fish swim in tanks and plants grow under arti­fi­cial light, for din­ners of dover sole and cake; there’s a lap pool, an excel­lent wine cel­lar, and enough lux­u­ry watch­es to cir­cu­late as gifts, and as reminders of the impor­tance of keep­ing up stan­dards of prompt­ness and respectabil­i­ty. One of the first things we see in the film is an elab­o­rate toy train set: The char­ac­ters, like their direc­tor, are world-build­ing in miniature.

Who can afford to ride out eco­log­i­cal and social cat­a­stro­phe in such abun­dance? Why, the peo­ple who caused it, of course. Dad (Michael Shan­non, in pleat­ed cords and nub­by sweaters) is a patri­cian oil exec­u­tive; his son (George MacK­ay), has lived his whole life under­ground, and is learn­ing about the world by edit­ing his father’s mem­oir, which is to say he’s learn­ing that the extrac­tion of nat­ur­al resources by multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions is an engine of social progress cre­at­ing infra­struc­ture and rais­ing stan­dards of liv­ing all over the the devel­op­ing world, and that the cli­mate of our plan­et changes all the time, actu­al­ly, for rea­sons that have noth­ing to do humans. Mom (Til­da Swin­ton) was a dancer, and now curates the art col­lec­tion: as the line from De Palma’s The Black Dahlia goes, the rich don’t own art – they safe­guard it, for future gen­er­a­tions to enjoy. 

The oth­ers are an ambigu­ous com­bi­na­tion of friends and ser­vants: a doc­tor (Lennie James); the mother’s best friend (Bronach Gal­lagher), also a renowned cook, who lost her own son and is nan­ny­ish­ly close to the kid; and a gruff dogs­body (Tim McIn­nerny), who, many years ago, took a bul­let fend­ing off invaders try­ing to breach the cave. There’s no more room at the inn, and the hard, nec­es­sary (or so every­one agrees) choic­es about who to include and who to exclude weigh on every­one, espe­cial­ly on mom, who still has old pho­tos of her fam­i­ly on an iPad no one else is sup­posed to look at.

Every­one in the bunker can just about live with them­selves, as long as they only have to live with each oth­er. But the arrival of an out­sider, a young woman (Moses Ingram) recent­ly sep­a­rat­ed from her own fam­i­ly, throws things out of bal­ance. Ini­tial­ly the plan is to throw her out to fend for her­self, but the boy takes a lik­ing to her. (The 32-year-old MacK­ay gives his 20-year-old char­ac­ter inter­mit­tent bursts of fer­al naïveté, in a script with incon­sis­tent ideas about his devel­op­men­tal age and emo­tion­al and intel­lec­tu­al maturity.) 

She enlivens everyone’s exis­tence with the hope­ful blush of roman­tic love, and pos­si­bly, even­tu­al­ly, the con­tin­u­a­tion of the fam­i­ly blood­line. But also pierces the bub­ble of their self-per­cep­tion, in line with the clichéd role of the non­white out­sider who serves as a mir­ror reveal­ing the main char­ac­ters’ blind spots. (She and the son argue when she ques­tions why he made the Chi­nese work­ers on the mod­el rail­road appear hap­py, it’s because, he says, they were mak­ing sac­ri­fices to build some­thing great.) Her pres­ence reopens old wounds from the time when the sur­vivors decid­ed who would and would not be saved, and reveals the hol­low­ness of their jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for mur­der­ous inequal­i­ty both before and after the collapse.

The film opens with an epi­graph from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quar­tets, and its end cred­its iden­ti­fy the char­ac­ters as ​“Moth­er,” ​“Father,” ​“Son,” and so forth, all of which is to say that Joshua Oppen­heimer is a for­mer recip­i­ent of a MacArthur ​“genius” grant. He wrote the lyrics to the songs, giv­ing his cast of non­singers wordy solil­o­quies to nav­i­gate with their large­ly plan­gent, dry and reedy voic­es. There’s rudi­men­ta­ry chore­og­ra­phy in the musi­cal num­bers, and pre­cious lit­tle fan­ta­sy in the stag­ings, aside from some light­ly moti­vat­ed shifts in the lighting. 

In a musi­cal, music is used to give the char­ac­ters a way to express what they mean to say when the scene and the dia­logue is not enough; but the film’s dra­mat­ic and philo­soph­i­cal frame­work is so schemat­ic, its dia­logue so ital­i­cized with sub­text, that the songs feel super­flu­ous as well as pro­sa­ic. Between num­bers, it’s easy to for­get that the film is a musi­cal. Rumoured to have been reject­ed from Cannes and Venice, the two-and-a-half-hour The End seemed poised to be an apoc­a­lyp­tic hot mess. That it has end­ed up being a tepid suc­cess is almost more of a disappointment.