There is only one musical in movie theaters right now that’s inspired this writer to hit the high notes, and it doesn’t contain a single Wicked witch. (Although its star Tilda Swinton has played more than her fair share of witches, both sweet and wicked, previously.) So The End, a post-apocalyptic musical of deadly sweet viciousness from writer-director and former documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer, might not defy gravity—neither should it, given it’s set in the aftermath of the world crashing down. But its characters, in thrall to their delusions, certainly do defy reality, smacking their boats ceaselessly against the storms of the past. And not only when they burst into song.
Their every wild-eyed utterance and under-sung whisper is a desperate scramble to rewrite truth and history in their own gorgeous golden calf image—to dust up the shattered remnants of humanity and glue them into something pretty before the curtains close one final time. Or, as the poster for Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece Children of Men put it, “Last one to die please turn out the light.”
And those dastardly kids might just get away with it too, if they can outlive everybody else at least. A variant on the winners being the ones who get to write the history books, The End knows there can be no winners at the end of the end. But it also knows that human nature demands otherwise, and Oppenheimer’s film is practically a dissertation on the mellifluous to atonal tension between who we are and who we think and tell ourselves that we are. Until the chasms between the two become echoes upon echoes; big hollow explosions that everybody pretends is music. Tra la la off the cliff, and fe fo fum onto the rocks below.
Nobody sees themselves as the villain in their own story. And so the nameless wealthy family at the heart of The End—Father (Michael Shannon), a former captain of the energy industry, alongside Mother (Swinton) and Son (George Mackay)—have dug themselves deep into the belly of a salt-mine where they amiably spend their days fiddling with flowers, rearranging their wall-space with an endless variety of Old Master oil paintings, and narrating the long-term dictation of Father’s most essential autobiography. Joined by three servants—Butler (Tim McInnerny), Doctor (Lennie James), and the devastatingly named Friend (Bronagh Gallagher)—the six-some wile away the hours, singing themselves sweet songs about their decency as they train to shoot guns day after day, only a fleet of impeccable Swiss time-pieces to delineate their procession.
Preserving the world order as they saw it before an unspoken climate horror broke society down outside—Oppenheimer opens the film with two lines from Eliot, which is about as succinct as oblivion will ever get—is their full-time duty. So schedule and organization rules the day—holidays and birthdays observed with machine-like efficiency, everybody blowing the candles out from between their rictus grins and going to ask the doctor for a new medley of pills right after. Twenty-five years have passed since whatever drove them underground went down, and Son, who was born unto the bunker, is now a man more or less—played by the strapping Mackay he certainly has the shape of one.
But Mackay (giving his third exceptional performance of 2024 after The Beast and Femme) wickedly infantilizes the character at every turn—Son teeters wildly between toddler and hormonal teen. Half sugar-rush, half wonder-eyed naif, Son is a big ol’ weirdo whether having conversations with the fish or humming with the incestuous vibes that thrum behind all his scenes with Mother and Friend in particular. Everybody stares at him dumbly as the what-they-have of humanity’s last stand—a fair-skinned messiah wrapped in expensive wool sweaters making his toy trains go choo-choo all the live-long day. And Son stares doubly so back, a mish-mash of their stories, their photographs, and the mess that is individual personhood pressing hard up against, perverting itself in its inevitable process.
Then one day, an outsider comes literally crashing in. A girl, called Girl (Moses Ingram, owner of by far the most beautiful voice of the bunch), tumbles right through a hole in the wall of one of the seemingly endless passages that stretch out in all directions from the family’s buried womb of a bunker. And with Girl comes everything strangers tend to bring—namely questions, reflections, chaos. Through Girl’s gaze every person inside the bunker becomes freshly, unwelcomely aware of themselves again, as people who can be looked at, interpreted, defined from their outside. And all the lies and the stories that they’d built up about themselves almost immediately tumble down like pillars of salt.
This is hardly new territory for the filmmaker—indeed it seems to be the predicate upon which all his visions are founded. In his 2012 documentary The Act of Killing (a masterpiece; go seek it out right this second if you’ve never seen it), Oppenheimer tasked the real-world perpetrators of the 1965 genocide in Indonesia with staging themselves fun little movie reenactments of their numerous war crimes. And the bastards were more than happy to do it too, since they were still in power and they had long ago turned their atrocities into tales of heroism and myth. Still, to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, life always finds a way, and in one unforgettable scene of that film one of them begins violently retching, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, as if ghosts or empathy long rotted away had suddenly sprung to life inside his belly, demanding satisfaction. (Jonathan Glazer wisely ended his shattering Holocaust film The Zone of Interest last year with what is basically a reenactment of this moment.)
The End is this idea writ large. Just set to music and lensed so beautifully by DP Mikhail Krichman that your eyes will weep at the formal sweeping classicism they manage to wring from a stark white cavern with fireworks ringing in its guts like hell’s indigestion. Father, Mother, Son, and all the rest whispering their obscenities as grace, as prayer, as semi-tuneful recompense.
The songs, if they could be called that, all sneak and worm into and through one another—it seems fairly clear that The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (which in a weird fit of confluence is also hitting theaters this weekend with a new 60th anniversary 4K restoration) had to have been a big influence on Oppenheimer here. Jacques Demy’s timeless musical of hyper-chromatic melancholia speak-sings us through its story of depression and heartbreak and compromise as if they’re the most romantic things in the world, and dammit the movie wills that impossibility into being.
And here too The End uses the musical form as its foremost instrument—it’s as if these characters believe they can sneak right past honesty by glomming themselves onto a more ecstatic truth via song and dance. We’re not awful, they moan; look how we harmonize. The biggest, grandest, most gorgeous lie of them all. Everybody put on your tap shoes—we’re tap tap tapping shut the holes in the Titanic as the band plays us murky downward forever.
