There’s a startling contrast to The End, introduced in its first minutes. A gloomy, dusty salt mine is soundtracked by light flutes and strings. Inside the mine’s cavernous depths, Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Son (George MacKay) live in an opulent mansion, where paintings and books line every room and hallway. Through hopeful song, they affirm that “together our future is bright”. But what future is there at the end of the world?
Joshua Oppenheimer’s offbeat riff on post-apocalyptic Earth reveals its circumstances in a slow trickle. There’s word of fires that have consumed the planet, then the fossil fuels that ignited them. At first glance, a musical seems like an unusual shift for Oppenheimer, best known for his pair of unflinching documentaries on the anti-communist Indonesian mass murders of the mid-20th century, The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence. But like the perpetrators in those, the family at the centre of the director’s first narrative film is content to live in ignorance of the destruction they’ve inflicted. Father and Son are working together on a biography of the former, rewriting the past to absolve him of the environmental collapse he may well have caused as an oil-industry magnate, while Mother prefers to ignore why she didn’t bring her side of the family to safety.
An audacious and daring formal experiment, even if its big swings don’t always pay off.
If that denialism isn’t quite as potent as it is in Oppenheimer’s documentaries, the film’s ideas are compelling in their unconventional approach. Putting thoughts to music, these people are evidently escaping more than just the raging fires outside — they’re evading a truth they can’t face. As is familiar in apocalyptic tales, their bubble is burst by an outsider (Moses Ingram) — a nameless stranger who appears seeking shelter, and pulls at the loose threads of the family’s falsehoods. Her presence has a particularly strong effect on the Son, having only known a sheltered existence in the bunker. MacKay’s unpredictable (and flatulent) performance is a highlight, containing all the awkwardness and boundless curiosity of a boy in arrested development. At 25, his only experience of the world has been filtered through textbooks and lies, and his burgeoning relationship with the newcomer pushes him to question everything for the first time.
The End is an audacious and daring formal experiment, even if its big swings don’t always pay off. This is no Wicked, with songs performed to an empty audience in dusty salt mines in stilted, talk-singing that provides a striking contrast with the lush, Sondheim-like orchestrations from composers Joshua Schmidt and Marius de Vries. Even so, Oppenheimer’s film constructs a mesmerising fantasy from the rubble of a scorched Earth, suggesting that the end is never really the end — it’s a new beginning.