The End
Joshua Oppenheimer, the great director of documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, returns with a curious post-apocalyptic musical. It is not a toe-tapper
Where Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries drew their soul-searing power from horrifying reality, The End is not just an intentionally unreal piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, but a full-blown musical. It takes place inside the luxuriously furnished bunker where an oil baron (Shannon) now resides along with his wife (Swinton) and son (MacKay). They left the rest of humanity to die decades ago and now bury their guilt beneath layers of waspish decorum. Their days are spent with fixed smiles, fussing over little decorative details inside their cavernous home to avoid reckoning with the carnage beyond it. For all its differences, The End drives home the same brutal truths about humanity as The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.
The casting is perfect. Between MacKay’s haunted-child demeanour, Shannon’s strait-laced intensity and the way Swinton always seems to be plugged into a frequency no one else can hear, they convey just the right feeling of off-ness. But while it makes thematic sense to tell their tale through the artifice of old-fashioned musical numbers, it’s not a mode in which the film ever seems comfortable. The songs are underwhelming and essentially interchangeable – there’s little variance in style and no real modulation of emotion. And while some of the photography is stunning, the static camera makes a poor dance partner for the actors.
Perhaps that’s purposeful too, another way of drawing attention to the fallacy of it all. But two-and-a-half hours is a long time to spend watching a bad musical, even an intentionally bad one.
Released 27 Mar by MUBI; certificate 12A
Screening at GFF 4 & 5 Mar