Hal Kitchen
There’s been a recent spate of movies satirizing the complacency of the super rich, Beatriz at Dinner, Glass Onion, Parasite and so on, but I don’t think any of them have done so through quite as bold and compassionate a vision as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, a musical cross between Triangle of Sadness and Day of the Dead. It’s a massively ambitious swing for the fence that thanks to the astonishing efforts of everyone involved, is pulled off magnificently. Give everyone Oscars.
Set in a tentative future where man-made climate change and the fossil fuel industry has left the surface world uninhabitable, a billionaire oil tycoon (Michael Shannon) and his wife (Tilda Swinton) have been living in a self-sufficient shelter deep beneath the earth, and there under the care of a select household of glorified servants, have raised their adult son (George MacKay) in the delusions common to the rich of today: “this is fine”, “we are civilised”, “the outside is dangerous”, “we had no choice”, “we’re not to blame”. That is until an outsider (Moses Ingram) arrives, an attractive young woman who may be the last human alive outside their little prison and is in desperate need.
Joshua Oppenheimer is of course best known as a documentarian, for his chilling study of mass murderers in The Act of Killing and his in my opinion superior follow up looking at their victims, The Look of Silence. A film like The End would be quite a leap for any filmmaker—save perhaps Bong Joon-ho who made Snowpiercer with Swinton, but even he’s never made a musical—but especially so for Oppenheimer. However, there is at least some thematic common ground here. The protagonists of The End are halfway between the unrepentant monsters of The Act of Killing and the bereft answer-seeking survivors of The Look of Silence. Mother and Father both try and maintain their own delusions and pass them down to their son, but deep down they know the truth. Rather than share their sanctuary with the world, they kept them out, unable to trust anyone else not to take retribution on them for killing the world above in the first place. In The Act of Killing Oppenheimer managed to find the humanity in real life death squad commanders, and once again here he is able to find it in these fictional monsters, who took everything from the earth and left it to its fate.
The End is above all a study in the human capacity for denial. The ability to push guilt deep down inside ourselves and plow ahead regardless in face of humanity’s extinction. It’s a bleak and fearful theme but The End approaches it with rare compassion and humor. Over the last few weeks there’s been much discussion about movies and when and whether they should be musicals. Joker Folie a Deux is a brilliant film that hamstrings itself with inconsistent musical numbers, and I’ve heard many argue Megalopolis‘s excesses would’ve gone down easier had it been a musical. The End is an extremely unlikely musical, so much so that I kept forgetting it was one between numbers. But for my money, it works.
For one, the songs are actually revealing and well performed. I would’ve bet that Shannon, Swinton and MacKay were all tone deaf but they each carry their tunes surprisingly well, as does Ingram who is probably the best singer of the cast. The location doesn’t lend itself to big musical numbers but my advice, watch the lighting. Many of the song numbers unfold in lengthy tracking shots and the way the lighting changes to convey the subtext in these scenes is one of those moments that you realize just how much work and thought is going into every facet of a production like this. The sets and costumes are phenomenal as well, the powder covered cavern exterior shown off in the film’s overture—yes, a proper overture!—is breathtaking.
The songs are great, adding color flavor and a bright surrealist edge, but the real meat of the story does lie in the drama between the ensemble cast as the Son’s mistrust starts to soften towards the sad, charming, funny newcomer and as her unprivileged outsider’s perspective starts to challenge the silence and falsehood of the only world he has known. As you might expect from this cast, the performances are all magnificent. Swinton’s haughty, fastidious reserve is intermingled with genuine love and fear for her son, and a deep seated shame and regret at having abandoned her loved ones above. Shannon’s bluff self importance and self-deception is likewise tempered with fatherly pride and MacKay, given perhaps the toughest role of all flits between eccentric awkwardness and nurturing love. This film demonstrates, just as, and in my view much more effectively than The Zone of Interest did, that the greatest monsters throughout human history, the people who did the most harm, were as like us as their victims. That latter side is represented by the Girl, and in that role, relative newcomer Moses Ingram absolutely shines. Her careful, probing humanity is intelligent and endearing, her emotional openness and sincerity a fatal antidote to the repression and denial exhibited by her savior/captor/oppressors. There are also a pair of fantastic turns from veterans Bronagh Gallagher and Tim McInnery as the household staff, each one used to wrestling with their precarious positions under their master’s roof, concealing their own deep-seated heartbreak.
The End is an undeniably strange confection. Both funny and desperately bleak, warm, festival and colorful and yet cold, dark and lonely. It’s slow pace and undeniably anticlimactic third act will turn off more people than it will convert, but I believe it succeeds where many others have failed, creating a truly off-beat experience that grapples with the darkest and most pressing questions facing humanity today, in a way that is unexpected, humanist and exceedingly brave and it’s my favorite film of the festival so far.
