The End
The documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer turns to a new format for his post-apocalyptic musical with Tilda Swinton and George MacKay.
Tim McInnerny, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, Tilda Swinton and Bronagh Gallagher
Image courtesy of Mubi.
Each year the London Film Festival includes what is known as a surprise film simply because its title is not announced in advance. However, in 2024 the film which fully earned that title was Emilia Pérez since it surprised on more than one level: it saw the French director Jacques Audiard who had never made a musical turning to that genre for the first time and doing so with a highly dramatic tale of a kind which would normally be treated in such a realistic mode that in anticipation the musical element sounded bizarrely inappropriate. One might have concluded that it was a one-off, but now we have The End which is even more surprising. Set in a future post-apocalyptic world some twenty years after the catastrophe has occurred, it is a serious drama which is offered in the form of a musical and in this instance it is the work as director, co-producer and co-writer of Joshua Oppenheimer, a man who is not only unassociated with musicals but whose reputation has been built on documentaries.
In the event The End contains another surprise too in that its setting and its very title suggest that at heart it will be a kind of companion piece to another recent offbeat film, Asif Kapadia’s underrated 2073. That film too presented a futuristic tale set after some apocalyptic event but was designed as a warning about where the real world already finds itself. One would expect The End to have a comparable aim but quite unexpectedly it proves to be a film which in telling a story about a small group of survivors uses this extreme situation to provide a stylised setting for a drama concerned less with any apocalypse than with issues around family and the self-deceit practised by human beings.
The End does not have to create a fully realised future world because it all takes place underground in what was formerly a salt mine. Within this space a family of survivors rich enough to have created their own home there are seen twenty years on from the utter devastation caused by climate change. The head of the family is a father who had made his money in oil (Michael Shannon) while his wife (Tilda Swinton) frequently reflects back on her one-time career as a ballerina, not least referencing her appearances with the Bolshoi. It is inside their lavish bunker home that their son (George MacKay) had been born so he has reached the age of twenty without ever having seen the outside world. Also, part of this household is a friend of the mother, a woman who had been a chef (Bronagh Gallagher), and present too are those they had brought with them, namely a doctor (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInnerny) and a maid (Danielle Ryan). When the place was first set up other survivors had attempted to join them but they had been forcibly ejected this being seen as a necessary protective measure. Now all these years later one other survivor, a girl (Moses Ingram), turns up and, although initially ready to cast her out too, this time father relents and she is allowed to stay on. None of these characters is given a name, a fact that is in keeping with this being a study of class and family and one in which as part and parcel of the stylisation it is unnecessary to go into any realistic detail over such matters as what is involved in having enough food for this existence to have continued for so long.
Before seeing The End, I was aware that many reviews of it had been hostile and I was consequently pleasantly surprised to find how well it worked up to the stage when its weaknesses became apparent. It helps, of course, that the players involved are all so talented and, having moved into a fully dramatised work, Oppenheimer proves an able director of actors and for the most part someone possessed of a gift for knowing how to direct musical numbers to good effect. In this respect the film plunges straight in with all of the cast required to perform in song in addition to speaking dialogue. The songs come by way of a film score by the theatre composer Josh Schmidt whose style echoes that of Stephen Sondheim and they are numbers that can be delivered to reasonable effect by actors who are not strictly speaking singers. The fact that the lyrics for these songs are by Oppenheimer himself confirms the extent to which the content of the songs is not incidental but very much part and parcel of what the film is seeking to express. Early on, for example, it is a song that establishes the attitude expected of all in this family regardless of their situation (‘Together Our Future is Bright’).
As the piece develops, the people are seen more clearly for what they are. The son is helping his father to produce a memoir which is intended to avoid what his career in oil really entailed such as contributing to the apocalypse and involving the exploitation of peoples. The friend of the mother lets slip the information that her talk of being a great ballerina is a fiction and in time it emerges that the friend herself has offered a distorted view of her own past history. The presence of the newcomer, the girl from outside, stirs up romantic feelings in the son for the first time and triggers concerns on his part about how the preservation of the family has been built on a ruthless disregard for others in society. There is quite enough here for The End to be fascinating but, sadly, nothing like sufficient material to justify the huge running length of almost two and a half hours. The second half feels absurdly overextended and also contains two big musical numbers that work less well. One is a number for Swinton to deliver and here the problem is that it somewhat echoes without being able to equal the brilliant Styne/Sondheim composition ‘Rose’s Turn’ at the end of Gypsy. The other song, a solo for Shannon, is given an absurdly exaggerated symbolical setting and thus through no fault of his proves disastrous. In the long run The End cannot be considered a success, but a huge amount of it is far better than I had anticipated and among the cast the admirably judged performance by George MacKay is a standout turn.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James, Michael Shannon, Danielle Ryan, Naomi O’Gario.
Dir Joshua Oppenheimer, Pro Signe Byrge Sørensen, Joshua Oppenheimer and Tilda Swinton, Screenplay Rasmus Heisterberg and Joshua Oppenheimer, Ph Mikhail Krichman, Pro Des Jette Lehmann, Ed Niels Pagh Andersen, Music Joshua Schmidt and Marius de Vries, Costumes Frauke Firl.
Final Cut for Real/The Match Factory/Wild Atlantic Pictures/Drje Film/Moonspur Films/Anagram-Mubi.
149 mins. Denmark/UK/Ireland/Italy/Sweden/Finland/USA/Germany/Qatar. 2024. US Rel: 6 December 2024. UK Rel: 28 March 2025. Cert. 12A.
