This early review of The End comes from the Toronto International Film Festival. It will be updated for the film’s theatrical release date in December 2024.
When The End begins, a wealthy industrial family of three (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and George MacKay) have been living in a spacious underground bunker with their helpful staff for 20 years, while society above them crumbles. Humanity is all but lost. But the arrival of a mysterious survivor forces them to question their rules and the stories they tell themselves about their own role in the global apocalypse. Mostly through song and dance.
In a bizarre but effective mix of genres and styles, the glitter of Golden Age Hollywood meets the grim dystopia of Children of menTrust documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer to create the world’s bleakest musical; as the director behind The act of killing And The gaze of silencea few vital, heart-rending works on the Indonesian Genocide in the 1960sit couldn’t have been otherwise. The result is a claustrophobic introspection of guilt and remorse that hardly seems suited to a grand film musical. But Oppenheimer’s focused approach to human drama makes it sing.
The central cast plays easily identifiable types, each so broad that their characters aren’t even named: the credits list them simply as Mother (Swinton), Father (Shannon), and Boy (MacKay). This last bastion of humanity revolves around this trio. Mother is often tired and stressed; she’s tired of the life she has, but she understandably has no other way out. So she spends her time repairing and fiddling with the many famous Impressionist paintings she brought home from decades ago, moving them from wall to wall of her opulent living room until everything feels just right.
Meanwhile, Father distracts himself from his loveless marriage by writing his autobiography, which chronicles his role in the climate crisis that pushed humanity over the edge. However, he insists that his good deeds outweigh his sins, and that perhaps he wasn’t so guilty after all.
And then there’s Boy, who, unlike the film’s other characters, has no memory or concept of the world above. This naive, awkward twentysomething was born in the bunker, and all he knows are its ornate corridors, its efficient food-growing laboratories, and the handful of icy caverns that surround it. A history buff who’s learned to avoid complicated political entanglements, his understanding of the world is entirely conceptual. So he breathes life into dioramas of human (specifically American) achievements, from westward expansion to the moon landing.
Boy also gets the film’s first musical number, which offers all sorts of aesthetic and conceptual whiplash. He sings optimistically about a sunrise, something he’s never seen and can only imitate by shining a flashlight on his little figurines. The mid-20th-century orchestra builds, as it might for a standard hopeful “I want…” song about a character’s dreamsbut the crescendo never comes, and Oppenheimer’s uninterrupted takes never blossom into full formal grandeur. Given the physical limitations of the bunker, they cannot.
Strikingly, this post-apocalyptic setting is also layered and highly utilitarian, considering who’s at the top. The family is outnumbered by their domestic help: their chef (Bronagh Gallagher), who practically raised Boy; their short-tempered doctor (Lennie James); and their zealous butler (Tim McInnerny). But they’ve also ensured that the security once afforded them by wealth and class still gives them a sense of control. When the stranger, Girl (Moses Ingram), finally stumbles into their lair, her fate is in their hands, and her options are to return to the cruel, empty world, or become part of what they call “family”—which means joining their ranks as a housekeeper. In this new world, servitude is the only means of survival.
Once all this cruelty is established and accepted, Oppenheimer gives the film no illusion of subversion or of delivering justice. The Endthe stains of capitalism and class form a firm status quo, and the characters aren’t given much room to disrupt this established order.
But what follows is often a sense of personal reckoning, in small but powerful ways. Each character carries the burden of what they’ve had to do to survive, and they keep these emotions hidden. Girl, a drifter who’s been alone for a while, however, is eager (perhaps a little too eager) to verbalize and discuss the worst parts of herself and the actions she regrets most, even if her choices have allowed her to survive a little longer.
In the process, she forces Mother and Father to at least acknowledge that their compartmentalization and their refusal to acknowledge their role in greater evil—to the world at large and to their own loved ones—has led to the slow, steady corrosion of their souls.
These realizations are also expressed in the form of solo numbers, as each character wanders the halls alone. There are few duets in The End —the family’s walled-off approach to living their days has led to the suppression of not just emotion, but honest human connection. But when Girl finally appears, and she and Boy begin to like each other, the film begins to blossom in small ways, from naughty, playful songs accompanied by bodies in abstract motion to a camera that subtly sweeps through space, capturing a larger sense of romance (and pageantry) through movement and framing.
Oppenheimer and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman work within the reality and physical limitations of each space. Even the most overt, showy emotions never magically conjure up an ensemble of dancers, preventing any sense of fulfillment. The filmmakers, however, work magic with their use of lighting and focus. There’s no point in questioning the reality or diegesis of sung dialogue, but since the film lacks the expansive stage space that would allow actors to weave in and out of conversations, or to shift from communicating with each other to delivering asides to the viewer, the film remixes this theatrical idea using cinematic devices: characters remain clearly visible as long as they can hear and understand each other, but they fall out of focus and fade into the background as soon as one of them takes the proverbial spotlight and begins to express inner thoughts and desires that the others don’t (or don’t want to) hear.
The bunker is largely a cold and inhospitable space, completely at odds with the glittering look of the Golden Age Hollywood musicals that inspired it. The End‘s orchestral sound. The characters’ desire for emotional connection, however, often distorts this palette in subtle ways, causing warmer tones and brighter lights to fade momentarily as the actors move through the space. It’s simultaneously dazzling and somber, which is entirely fitting for an Oppenheimer film.
In The act of killingthe director spent years interviewing a real-life mass murderer who took pride in his crimes. He even had this controversial figure reenact his brutality through the lens of the Hollywood genre (gangster films and the like), with a handful of colorful, dazzling detours that resembled large-scale musicals. The idea of cinematic self-reflection as a means of suppressing and ultimately challenging one’s actions has long been a part of Oppenheimer’s work, and in The gaze of silencehe offers an even more risky look at the stories those in power tell that help them wash their hands of innocence.
These ideas seep through to The End also. The film is physically limited by design, but ends up emotionally expansive, with big, eerily quiet psychological detours that leave each character in the room wrestling with what they’ve done, before their acceptance (or more likely, their denial) takes the form of a song.
Ultimately, what’s most troubling about Oppenheimer’s use of musical form is that singing from the heart has long been considered a way to express emotional truth from deep within. Here, the characters most responsible for the state of the world refuse to acknowledge what they’ve done—but they sing anyway, fulfilling the film’s stylistic imperatives like automatons, struggling to achieve the honesty that usually underlies the great Hollywood musical. Few films have ever been so dark and yet sound so sweet.
The End will be released in U.S. theaters on December 6.