The elite sing off-key at humanity's curtain call in The End

The theatricality of evil has dominated filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s career. The first film in his pair of brutal, phenomenal documentaries—The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence—turned the genocide in Indonesia from 1965 – 1966 into broad performance pieces reenacted by the actual perpetrators of those mass killings. The second watches killers squirm under interrogation, their ghoulish self-mythologizing shrinking away under the spotlight. Oppenheimer makes his narrative debut with another near-farce about the lies people tell themselves to get through the day. The End isn’t a musical about murderers with bloody hands, but about a fossil fuel magnate’s family a few steps removed from the dirty work. They survive the post-apocalypse in a bunker, singing clunkily about their guilt, their present, their future.

The artifice is all around them—literally. Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Father (Michael Shannon) twirl about their well-appointed corner of a salt mine, seasonally redecorating the walls with fine art that they’ve smuggled down into the bowels of the earth with them. The couple and their live-in friend-servants (Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James) put on a daily performance of normalcy for the 20-going-on-12-year-old Son (George MacKay), who was born in the shelter. He’s only ever known life after the world ended, making him a particularly pliable subject to carry on the human race—and a perfectly unquestioning audience.

It’s a slight satire, the criticism lodged as much in the fantastical form as the thin content. Even if Father’s main hobby wasn’t dictating a revisionist biography to his Son, the idea that the people who ruined things also hold the power to rewrite the history around who ruined things runs amok in The End. Unexpectedly, so does someone outside of this bubble: a Girl from the outside (Moses Ingram), who stumbles into their hideout, led there by the survivors’ smoke. (Even after a climate disaster, they’re still taking the atmosphere down a peg.)

Her arrival offers the 148-minute film’s main point of plot tension, though even her probing questions poking at the family’s constructed reality barely seem to quicken anyone’s pulse. Soon enough, she’s paired up with Son, and assimilated into the family unit. Oppenheimer and his co-writer Rasmus Heisterberg dodge any questions of race that may come up when a Black woman, born into whatever hellscape lies above ground, arrives into the ultimate space of white privilege, and opt for brief awkwardness over meaningful confrontation. This may reflect the deny, deny, deny ethos of the rich head-buriers, but it also keeps the tiring film treading water.

The performers follow suit, circling the contained set while performing their tedious musical monologues. Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics, with buried discomfort sometimes peeking through the atonal sunniness, which are set to composer Joshua Schmidt’s tunes. Despite how they’re deployed, they aren’t the earworms of Hollywood’s Golden Age, or even especially melodic, but songs that are nearly as perfunctory and mundane as the family’s daily routine. Just as they drink wine with their lavish meals despite its sourness, they sing out their emotions despite the shared fiction that they don’t have any—their excess must be sustained despite all evidence to the contrary.

When these stifled, stunted emotions threaten to surface (like in Shannon’s big number) or manifest perhaps for the first time (when Son falls for Girl), the music and choreography get the closest to holding our interest. Mikhail Krichman’s nimble camera flows through the looping compound in long takes, his lights shifting from warm to cold tones in response to the mood of the repetitive songs. Ingram and MacKay are the best singers of the bunch, though Shannon is a compelling enough presence to hold your gaze throughout his oddly-pitched songs (Swinton cannot boast even that). The younger cast members, MacKay especially, are allowed some pliability in the stiff film—when MacKay’s man-child cuts loose, windmilling his arms around wildly, life springs forth for the first time in the foreboding, shadowy tunnels.

But The End is more concerned with plodding through small half-reckonings, with victims both personal (those left behind or abandoned) and sweeping (the inhospitable climate). But the main evidence of conflict only lives on at the bunker’s firing range, in the fire drills, as the bullet-born scar on the butler’s abdomen. In a watered-down version of Oppenheimer’s non-fiction work, self-awareness appears mostly as hidden pangs and flickers of conscience—and even that feels like a generous fantasy.

One never believes that these lightly sketched survivors will limp towards a “brighter” future in The End, as the singers assure each other and the camera through gritted teeth. But the melancholy absurdity—dragged out over two-and-a-half hours—doesn’t revel in its ironic condemnation. It’s a long sigh, an off-key parody song performed before humanity’s curtain call.

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Writers: Joshua Oppenheimer, Rasmus Heisterberg
Stars: Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George Mackay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Lennie James, Tim McInnerny
Release Date: December 4, 2024