The End
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 2 hours 28 minutes
Stars: Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay
Writers: Joshua Oppenheimer, Rasmus Heisterberg
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
You might expect a musical about the apocalypse to be either an ironic song-and-dance satire or a dirge-darkened eulogy, but for his first narrative film, two-time Oscar documentary nominee Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) has in mind something that is surprisingly hopeful.
Not hopeful, I mean, in the sense that humanity will somehow survive its follies, or even come to terms with having caused its own eradication, but rather that humans will remain human — and largely humane — until the very end.
In a bunker carved from a salt mine, a father (Michael Shannon) a mother (Tilda Swinton), their cook (Bronagh Gallagher), their doctor (Lennie James), and their butler (Tim McInnerny) have been taking shelter from Earth’s ecological devastation since even before the couple’s son (George MacKay), now 25, was born down there. Up on the surface, the world has turned to a frozen, blizzard-swept hellscape. (Is this, maybe, a parallel narrative to Snowpiercer, the doomsday sci-fi film that also stars Swinton?) Down here, thanks to plentiful fuel and a system that periodically (and noisily) gulps down oxygen from the outside, the family and their trio of minions not only survive, but thrive in an opulent yet necessarily limited manner.
Perhaps as a way to universalize the characters, co-writer Oppenheimer never tells us their names. We know only that, in his long-ago life aboveground, Dad was an oil company executive. Mom was a ballet dancer. Together they have fashioned a truly luxurious sarcophagus for themselves, furnished with antiques from around the world, decorated with gaudily framed works of the Old Masters. Is that a real Monet hanging on the wall? Probably, but the family is so far gone into their fantasy of enduring happiness, they could very well be lying to themselves about that, too.
As for the son, called “Son” by his parents, he spends most of his time tinkering with his elaborate train set. Decked out with mountains and cities and countryside, the layout is not just a toy – it’s a finely detailed continental landscape designed to reflect the version of American history that his parents have taught him. Among those lessons: The Chinese workers who died by the thousands building the transcontinental railroad were “happy to be part of something.” It’s the ultimate outcome of extreme home schooling.
The movie’s first song comes immediately, as the family engages in a jaunty trio, reflecting on how happy they are to be together all this time, living in such comfort. As with most of the songs co-written by Oppenheimer and composer Josh Schmidt – whose stage musical scores have earned four Obie Awards and nine Drama Desk nominations – even the characters’ attempts at whimsy take on shades of mournfulness.
Into this macabre tableau staggers Mary (Moses Ingram), a young, nearly frozen woman – the sole character whose name we learn. Mary is a refugee from a small settlement of scavenging humans who somehow manage to scrape out survival in the shambles of what was once a nearby town. The family nurses her back to health as, they tell themselves, any decent family would. When she’s healthy again, they also make plans to send her back outside to face near-certain death.
But Mother and Father don’t count on young love. Or lust. Or whatever it is that erupts from a 25-year-old man whose encounters with women have been limited to his emotionally distant mother and her subservient housekeeper.
As Son refuses to give up Mary, Mom and Dad reluctantly allow her to stay, and before long the pair are sort-of married (no one seems to bother formalizing the union). Some time later, Mary is pregnant. But if you think that helps normalize life in a salt cave at the end of the world, you should re-think that position.
Swinton, the Great Sphinx of the movies, is her usual inscrutable self here, and that works perfectly for the role of Mother, who seems to fear any outburst of emotion might cause the walls of the family cave to come crashing down. Shannon’s trademark intensity well serves Father, who spends his days (or nights, who can tell?) sitting behind his enormous executive desk writing a corporate memoir no one will ever read.
George MacKay, who broke everyone’s hearts as the innocent soldier thrust into the maw of war in 1917, may be getting a bit ripe for the part of another naïve manchild, but here he gives it one last shot, affecting as a 20-something who’s been dipped in the amber of perpetual childhood by his doting parents.
Ingram, by a mile the best singer in the company, serves sweetly as our surrogate in the family cave, observing the odd goings-on with combined amusement and cold calculation.
The essence of film as an art form is to take viewers places they’ve never been before, and to think in ways they have, perhaps, dared not. The End, for all its claustrophobic, music-laced insanity, is certainly unlike any movie you’ve experienced, mostly in good ways. Sometimes it takes a hemmed-in movie to expand your vision.
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