Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014)—about Indonesia’s 1965 genocide of more than half a million alleged “communists”—are unqualified masterpieces, and with his maiden foray into drama, the writer/director continues to prove himself one of modern cinema’s true greats.
An end-of-the-world musical set in an underground bunker inhabited by a makeshift family, Oppenheimer’s latest is a wildly unique genre mash-up. Screening at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11 (following its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival), it’s a one-of-a-kind triumph. The film continues his preoccupation with questions of guilt, silence, repression, performance, and the way in which individuals, history, and reality itself are constructed by the stories we tell ourselves and each other—as well as the lies we manufacture to cope with our complicity in the apocalyptically unthinkable.
A once-great ballerina whose appearance at the Bolshoi is the stuff of familial legend, Mother (Tilda Swinton) is wracked by nightmares that she doesn’t want to discuss. Instead, she suppresses them with medications prescribed by surly Doctor (Lennie James). During a check-up, Mother bemoans the fact that her mind is full of “trash” that bubbles up whenever she’s asleep. Even during her waking hours, however, she’s only barely keeping a lid on the ugliness lurking inside.
So too are the rest of her clan, which includes her former oil executive husband Father (Michael Shannon), her adept cook Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), their cheery Butler (Tim McInnerny), and her grown Son (George MacKay), who’s never seen the shine of the sun or the glare of the moon, having been born in this hodgepodge clan’s subterranean lair.
The End tantalizes from the start by not explicating the specifics of its scenario. Still, through time spent in these characters’ company, it becomes clear that they reside in a series of bunkers situated in the far reaches of an icy mine, where they have electricity, water, and shelter from the outside world, which has turned into a climate change-produced hellscape of fires, starvation, and murder.
A far cry from that wasteland, their primary dwelling is decorated with art masterpieces that are tended to by Mother—who amusingly decries Monet’s “Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son” as “kitschy”—as well as fake flowers crafted by Son, who’s also working on a diorama comprised of various iconic moments, images, and elements from America’s heyday. Son is additionally writing Father’s biography, and the passages he’s penned about his professional career rub Father the wrong way, based as they are on unflattering news articles that he dubs “lies.”
Oppenheimer’s nuclear family has interred itself for the sake of safety, yet the secrets they’ve buried within are constantly threatening to emerge like zombies reaching out from the grave. Friend laments the loss of her cancer-stricken son Tom, Doctor is jealous of Friend’s closeness (including sexually?) with Son, and Mother is irrationally fixated on the notion (shared by no one else) that one of the drawing room walls is a different color than the rest.
“Subtlety is important,” says Mother, and Oppenheimer treats his fantastical conceit with an aesthetic agility and fluidity that lends it an unreal, skewed atmosphere. Everything looks normal and yet is somehow corrupt and malformed beneath the surface, and the tension between the visible and invisible is omnipresent, not to mention in tune with the material’s concurrent clashes between fact and fiction, reason and madness.
Oppenheimer’s peerless non-fiction films are investigations into the horrible ramifications of atrocities—on people, families, and societies—when the perpetrators are successful and thus given free rein to write history as they see fit. However, whereas The Act of Killing concludes with a killer retching as if to purge himself of his evil, The End’s characters find an outlet for their grief, shame, remorse and insanity via songs.
By Joshua Schmidt (music) and Oppenheimer (lyrics), the songs have a cascading quality not dissimilar from Oppenheimer and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman’s camerawork, and which veer wildly between introspection and projection. A consistently surprising mixture of the upbeat, the off-kilter, and the tormented, they’re a daring formal gambit, highlighted by a Swinton bathroom number that’s shattering in its mixture of confession and denial.
Once it’s established this hermetically sealed enclave and its not-quite-there protagonists, The End detonates the status quo with Girl (Moses Ingram), a stranger who appears in their tunnels. While the family initially attempts to violently expel her, they soon do an about-face and embrace her as one of their own. Girl, though, is less skilled at blocking unpleasant thoughts of the past, which for her have to do with the death of her father, mother, and sister.
To Boy, she’s a breath of fresh air precisely because she wants to reckon with what she’s done and, consequently, what it’s done to her. Mother, on the other hand, recognizes her potential to stir up old sins, although Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg’s script avoids easy conflicts, instead allowing cracks to form one sharp and revealing ditty at a time.
Not everyone in The End is an accomplished vocalist (namely, Shannon), but the cast’s performances—whether in musical or straightforward dramatic registers—boast a unique rhythm, equal parts chipper, pained, and unhinged. The last of those is most evident in Boy, whom MacKay plays as a pseudo-human created with affection, imagination, and disinformation.
As evidenced by an early number in a work shed, there’s something incomplete and broken about the young man, and the actor turns him into the byproduct of his caregivers’ deceptions and dreams. As with his co-stars, he refuses to court sympathy, and his dynamic with the extraordinary Swinton and Shannon is the foundation for Oppenheimer’s self-conscious portrait of a self-consciously fabricated family and world.
Despite rising to a crescendo on multiple occasions, The End ultimately locates its emotional power in silence as much as in song. Surrounded by the finest things in life (or, rather, a life that used to be), these survivors preach at the start that “together our future is bright,” only to realize at tale’s conclusion that “we’re drowning in light.” In the end, no tune can save them from their crimes, their loneliness, and the cold, dark nothingness that lies before them.
