It’s opening night at the end of the world, and rehearsals for the final curtain are getting shaky, much as they were in Joshua Oppenheimer’s unforgettably bold documentary features. His startling Indonesian genocide diptych (The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence) depicted some alarming remembrances of one of the planet’s most shameful chapters from the perpetrators and victims alike; his up-close-and-personal relationship with the killers in the first film in particular being grounded in off-kilter filmmaking methods where they were allowed to make art about their experiences as state-sanctioned murderers. Some opted for the musical route, utterly tone deaf and deluded in their attempts to dramatise the worst things a human is capable of, and Oppenheimer stitches them up brilliantly… yet how couldn’t he? People with that much evil inside them will often hoist themselves by their own petard, even if they don’t see the consequences that they should for their heinous actions.
Yet in his documentary work, his angle was removed, looking in from the sidelines, and he was in a position to capture some revelatory footage from behind enemy lines. One can be quite impressed and baffled, then, that his narrative feature debut, The End, is essentially his own version of the atrocity exhibition his subjects made before him, with the ‘exhibition’ part taken amusingly literally; the characters live in what resembles and is treated like an art gallery, curated and obsessed over by Tilda Swinton’s nervy former ballerina who finds herself entombed by her own ambition.
After living for a quarter century in prefabs within a salt mine, she, her shifty oil CEO husband (Michael Shannon), guileless son (George MacKay), damaged best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), cowed butler (Tim McInnerny) and callous doctor (Lennie James) have eked out a sheltered existence while the world above burns; a brief description of this particular apocalypse makes it sound like the entire planet has become Centralia, Pennsylvania, with unquenchable fires belching out from the surface after implied environmental irresponsibility. Yet there they live without consequence, enjoying creative and intellectual pursuits like writing the last book in the world, or building a diorama of US history from the Civil War to the construction of the Hollywood sign. Their heads are less buried in the sand than they are in the salt… that is until a raggedy stranger (Moses Ingram) shows up unconscious at their doorstep, throwing their overprivileged harmony into disarray as feelings of love and hatred are sparked by her unexpected appearance.
Within the oddly-conceptualised interiors this bleak musical satire takes place in, overhead lights constantly bleed through opaque ceiling panels, never once letting you (the viewer) or they (the characters) settle into anything close to an authentic home environment. Its coolly-coloured production design feels like a soundstage in the best way, sprinkling on the artifice and dunking the piece in claustrophobia for maximum nightmarish effect.
For all of the impossible home comforts (it’s implied through omission that these doomsday preppers have unlimited access to alcohol, fresh food and delicacies, suggesting a gruesome level of wealth that has allowed them to keep it going for 25 years with no sign of slowing down) this lucky lot have, they live under a drab blueness that can never come close to the simple blessing of natural light, of the morning sun on your face or the melancholy moments just before nightfall. The closest thing they get to natural beauty is the stunning patterns formed in the salt that preserves them, all geometrically satisfying waves and slices through the excavated world they live and will no doubt die in.
That inevitability has created some odd behaviours in them, particularly from George MacKay’s Son who has never been above ground; MacKay is becoming extremely adept at playing a variety of strange, uncomfortable young men following his memorable work in Femme and The Beast, and with some eccentric dance moves peppered in solo and ground numbers alike, this is no exception. His excitable glee is leeched off of by his parents, who live vicariously through him and try to channel his energy into their own memories, with some of the best scenes in the film centring around MacKay’s attempts to biographise his own father, spinning a philanthropic, romantic lie out of a career of exploitation and oppression.
By the end of The End, you come away having witnessed three fully fleshed-out, deeply complicated souls sing themselves into moral oblivion.
MacKay, Swinton and Shannon are all on top form, each relishing the opportunity to work with another auteur with a fresh perspective on the current human condition; by the end of The End, you come away having witnessed three fully fleshed-out, deeply complicated souls sing themselves into moral oblivion. Ingram’s sympathetic interloper is perhaps slightly more underwritten; her own trauma is something explored solidly by the crushing finale, yet her role stays mournfully static despite having lived a much harder existence than her unwilling hosts. Support from McInnerny, James and especially Gallagher is strong, forming solid characters out of peripheral figures in the lives of these capitalistic excuses for human beings.
Each actor (except James, inexplicably) gets the opportunity to flex their musical muscles, all bringing distinct and unconventionally beautiful performance styles to the material. With songs written by Joshuas Schmidt and Oppenheimer and score by Schmidt and Marius De Vries, the cast are tasked with some truly twee scenes that range from optimistic ballads to despondent dirges, not all of them successful but all of them full-blooded and enthusiastically performed.
The glacial long-take camerawork might not be the most adventurous or dynamic, but Oppenheimer harnesses Andrey Zvyagintsev cinematographer Mikhail Krichman so well that you’d think he’d been making narrative films for decades, bringing poise and atmosphere to the musical numbers to give them a uniquely handsome and unsettling beauty. Melodically, the soundscape of the film bizarrely recalls the romantic reveries of Justin Hurwitz’s La La Land score, yet applied to far darker and more malevolent ends. Such a choice is a sweet and sour combo that feels entirely right and counterintuitive at the same time, unleashing genuine theatre kid energy throughout its cast while also being total poison to anyone looking for a Broadway smash brought to life on-screen.
Through its setting and arch tone, The End is a distinctly airless film by design that can be extremely difficult to get a handle on, so much so that anyone can be forgiven for not getting on its wavelength at any point; you may find yourself struggling to assess it from moment to moment as the war between its straight drama aspects and the genre-bending musical ones wages from beginning to end. But then again, no one but Oppenheimer (with all his baggage as one of cinema’s bravest documentarians) could have made this quite the same way.
The film itself feels like a lengthy interrogation of what he’s personally witnessed, struggling to comprehend just what the hell he communicated to the world with his first documentary feature, putting himself in the hypothetical shoes of the musical visionary sorting through the guilt of running away from (or maybe even causing) countless deaths. His empathy and ability to listen to descriptions of pure evil from the proverbial and despicable horse’s mouth has led him here, to an exercise in musical expression that can be folly to many but profound to others.
The distinctly divisive reception The End has garnered since its Telluride premiere last year colours it as a ‘you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it’ experience, as you can find yourself entirely lost within its labyrinthine logic and askew artifice, aligning itself more with the mannered world of Leos Carax and Sparks’ Annette than any other modern musical. As for its status as Oppenheimer’s fiction feature debut, it’s thrilling that something as original and characterful as The End is only just the beginning for him, promising an unpredictable new way of seeing the world as bold and hard to digest as his already-classic documentaries.
THE END IS IN SELECT CINEMAS NATIONWIDE
Simon’s Archive – The End (2024)
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