There is a bleak irony over pretty much everything in The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative feature debut, The End. And perhaps that should go without saying given its title. But this is a movie that opens on a pretty, lilting song initiated by George MacKay that sounds like something out of Sondheim, its lyrics professing affirmations of contentment and hope in dark times, some poignancy for what is lost, and it is being sung by a family holed up in a bunker two decades after an apocalypse. That there can be sentiments like that expressed in a way so buoyantly is absurd given the context, and even more absurd the more we learn about this family. The joke is a very good one, and yet there’s not much laughing to be had in The End.
It is indeed a movie set at The End, in the aftermath of a global climate catastrophe. How many survivors are left from it is unclear, but one wealthy family has managed to sequester themselves in an enormous and highly elaborate bunker deep in an underground salt mine. They are all nameless, a conceit that is quite wrong and awkward for this movie. Father (Michael Shannon) ran an oil conglomerate that likely contributed to the disaster, and Son (MacKay) has never seen the outside world. Alongside them and a neurotic Mother (Tilda Swinton), are the family doctor (Lennie James), their butler (Tim McInnerny), and a Friend (Bronagh Gallagher); and these have been their only relationships for twenty years until a Girl (Moses Ingram) discovers the bunker and intrudes on their sheltered existence.
The choice to colour this story of deluded elites waiting out the apocalypse with musical numbers is one that I think works structurally to the ends of satire. These buffoons who arguably wrought their own destruction, living in blissful conditioned ignorance of the true scope of things, and yearning with optimism for a surer, brighter future for themselves -illustrating that in the language of an ornate musical really hammers the point well. They live in a fantasy world already, where Father is writing his memoirs with the editorial aid of his son, completely eschewing culpability and justifying his own positions, in the expectation that it will all be read by some public someday; where Mother is fabricating an illustrious career she'd had with the Bolshoi Ballet that she will certainly return to one day. They maintain their pieces of classical artwork, preserved from the before-times, but the names and significance of them have already been lost. They count themselves as experts on virtually everything in Earth culture and history, especially the parents, in lieu of any outside force to contradict them. They exist in a world of lackadaisical fictions, why not sing about those figments as well?
This really does seem to be the intent of them at first, drab though some of the numbers are (and still others feel wholly innocuous). But as the movie slowly marches on over a fairly unreasonable two and a half hours, Oppenheimer's satirical bite becomes less sharp, the songs become perhaps more earnest, and the movie's tenor on the whole just a lot more dim. To the point that the ironic tone, maintained semi-consistently- becomes less endearing and simply too dismal. The evolution of Girl is a great example of this -someone who poses an immediate threat to the family as both a stranger and an outsider to their social class- who can call them out and correct their blinded misconceptions, especially in Son, who is rapidly romantically inclined towards her. But what challenges she does bring and what disruption she represents comes to very little as, though she does influence Son and his perception of what the world was and is, she has no material effect on the others or their conditions -which she is just forced by time and circumstance to accept for herself.
The movie's attitude around the end of the world, when glimpsed past the facade of sentiment, can be pessimistic almost to the point of defeatist; like an Adam McKay movie but without the brazen commentary and obnoxious smugness. Oppenheimer selects his target well and with some sense of viciousness, but he can't seem to bring himself to attack them opaquely, administer repercussions, or even engage much intellectually with the magnitude of climate catastrophe. There's not even much push-and-pull on the part of the servants, at least not from Doctor and Butler. Friend is a little more outspoken, a little more honest -owing to the tragic circumstances of her coming to the bunker at the cost of her partner- but this merely emphasizes the callousness of her fellow survivors and sustained dimness of the situation.
Taken in a vacuum, some of the songs are nice. Written by Joshua Schmidt and Marius de Vries, they are by and large more proficient than good, but Oppenheimer makes fine use of them, especially in the ensemble pieces like the opener "A Wonderful Gift" and "We Kept Our Distance". Though while Swinton and Ingram are fine singers (and MacKay is quite good), Shannon is notably lacking, as are James and McInnerny to a lesser extent -and not so much from lack of talent as their songs not being written for their range. It's particularly apparent in Shannon's solo "The Big Blue Sky". The song sequences are shot competently though not creatively -there is minimal choreography that the camera's fluidity endeavours to make up for, though the design of the spaces these characters are confined to even still proves limiting.
We know very little of the world outside the bunker, except for the scattered horror stories from the Girl, whose whole family perished above ground. Naturally, nobody is very concerned about rescuing others -even Girl herself after a time. The End is a story of assimilation into ignorance. Son might be ever so slightly improved, but Father is still stubborn, Mother is still in denial; everybody would count among the last people who deserve to survive the end of the world -which it is clear by the end is a futile dream. They and any descendants they manage to produce are doomed to this bunker indefinitely.
A movie about the end-times does not require a happy ending or even the vestige of hope necessarily. We can take a little bleakness in our forecasts of the future from time to time. But in The End, Oppenheimer doesn't invest enough in the satire to overcome the film's inherent dreariness, even with musical numbers. His commentary on the elites saving themselves at the cost of everyone else is not new or scathing, his cynicism over this and their basic human nature leaves the film feeling like a soulless enactment of a depressingly feasible human endgame the film offers no option but to accept, like Girl. The songs give it some sharp ironic character, but they say nothing. The End is bitter and so are we.
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