Given that Joshua Oppenheimer made his name with two of the most absurdly brave and utterly harrowing documentaries ever made in the forms of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, one might reasonably expect his first drama film – one about the end of the world, no less – to be a brutal affair. Yet, that’s not what the aptly titled The End is, a musical about the apocalypse that isn’t *really* about the apocalypse at all, but instead about growing up with emotionally disordered parents, where the true ultimate horror is not mass extinction, but turning into your dad. It’s a flawed and frustrating yet ultimately fascinating and moving approach, and one that benefits from leaving all preconceptions at the door.
In what turns out to be a very theatrical, stagy conceit, The End places us in a doomsday bunker decades after the world above has crumbled into fire and climate collapse, inhabited by just six unnamed people. Most important is the billionare energy industry magnate (known here as just Dad and played by Michael Shannon) who brought the planet to ruin, his former ballerina wife (Mum, played by Tilda Swinton), and their Son (George Mackay), who was born in the bunker and knows reality only as his parents have taught it to him.
Supported by a skeleton staff of a friend/confidante (Bronagh Gallagher), a butler (Tim McInnerny), and a doctor (Lennie James), their carefully curated and luxuriously self-sufficient world is upturned by the arrival of a Girl (Moses Ingram), who awakens in the Son senses of love and curiosity that expose the cracks in the underground dynamics. At two-and-a-half hours long, The End really does take its time digging into this story and the odd folks who people it and there’s plenty of stuff that feels overly indulgent, but Oppenheimer has a good sense of when a sprinkle of bizarre magic is most urgently needed – The End is overlong and a bit languid, but it’s never boring.
Central to this is Mackay as the Son. Swinton and Shannon are, of course, reliably good value, but the Son is by a huge margin the best-written and best-performed role, Mackay tapping in again to the unique, cusp-of-androgynous physicality that made him so brilliant in True History of the Kelly Gang and The Beast. It also helps that he gets the best songs – as a musical, The End is hardly a toe-tapper (and the whole-ensemble medley songs are just straight up bad), but Mackay puts enough force into his numbers to make them properly moving, even when his accent completely slips.
The bunker itself, a converted salt mine deep beneath the earth, is consistently striking (as it needs to be, it’s the only place we ever are, Oppenheimer never once giving in to the temptation to show the outside world). Both in the winding white tunnels that make up the compound’s ‘roads’ and in the extravagantly decorated rooms that, plonked in the middle of a cave, look like movie sets under construction, Oppenheimer keeps his visuals deliberately artificial – everything here is a façade to avoid confronting the real.
Pretty naturally, The End has, at least implicitly, been marketed as yet another eat-the-rich satire about delusional elites and their freaky, destructive ways, but if you go in expecting The Menu or Parasite with an apocalyptic twist, you’re going to be wildly disappointed. This is a wholly more original thing, wrestling with the idea that no matter the circumstances (the Mum has even retained her clear eating disorder deep into the apocalypse), we will always be what our families make us. Does it convince entirely? I’m not sure it does. But it does ask the question with admirably unabashed and weird ambition.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 