The End Review: Going Out on a High Note

Not since Melancholia has the end of the world invited such a grand smile on one’s face. Joshua Oppenheimer makes a dazzling dramatic debut with his unconventional musical The End. But, in a way, it’s an obvious follow-up to his groundbreaking hybrid documentary The Act of Killing. That 2012 doc still brings chills for Oppenheimer’s shrewd ploy of having Indonesian mass murderers confront their crimes by re-enacting them in dramatic vignettes and musical numbers. The End, meanwhile, focuses on another kind of mass murderer: the normalised one.

Michael Shannon stars as a nameless fossil fuel tycoon whose violence seemingly extends to a global tally of casualties. This father provides his family with the luxuries that fuelled humanity’s demise. The End whisks audiences to a nifty bunker that’s housed them for 20-odd years. His wife (Tilda Swinton) and son (George MacKay) carry on in their impressively cavernous abode deep in the porcelain mines. Oh, and like the murderers in The Act of Killing, these guilty parties also sing.

Father, mother, and son belt out tunes as they pass the final days with the mom’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), a doctor (Lennie James), and a tap-dancing butler (Tim McInnery). The bunker offers these survivors an alternate reality. They spend the days alternating the artwork on the walls from the seemingly vast archive of history’s finest paintings, which the mom brought in case of emergency. They repaint the walls, again drawibg from a seemingly vast repository of spare paint, to suit the seasons or to complement the newly rotated artwork. These people don’t have a philosophy of “women and children only.” They’re all Billy Zane in Titanic saving the last lifeboat for themselves.

And yet they’ve raised a boy here. The son lives in blissful ignorance, vaguely aware that fires and fossil fuels forced them underground. But he spends his days writing his dad’s biography and reading aloud his penned platitudes about his father building schools, helping the sick, and yada yada yada as if philanthropy whitewashes exploitation. It’s very topical—hello, Scotiabank arts washing!—and the end may seem nearer than viewers think given the obvious parallels to contemporary life. And when an interloper (Moses Ingram) somehow infiltrates the cave after braving the world above, the carefully contained world can no longer isolate the boy from reality.

Survivors’ guilt shows its cracks in the veneer of happiness, though. The mom and her friend clearly carry the weight of leaving so many friends and family members behind. Their guilt resounds most clearly through song.

The End offers a truly unique musical experience as characters harness the power of song. When reality sets in, they transition from spoken word to musical verse. All seems bright and rosy in these mostly upbeat musical numbers that turn frowns upside down. Oppenheimer favours a format closer to European libretto than Hollywood musical, too. Audiences won’t leave The End humming its tunes, but the songs will haunt them long after it, well, ends.

Oppenheimer employs a shrewd coup of casting, too. Aside from Gallagher, whom audiences might remember from the 1990s’ Irish rock musical The Commitments, these actors aren’t especially known for singing. Shannon mostly sing-talks through his songs, while MacKay sort of carries a tune. Swinton, meanwhile, has a very nice voice even though it shows few signs of musical training. But that’s where the music of The End hits its high notes: when the voices crack.

There’s something disquietingly moving about hearing these untrained voices quiver with raw emotion. As much as the cave dwellers try to avoid reality through song, Oppenheimer rejects the escapist element of musicals.

Reality sets in hardest when characters get their showstopping numbers. They give voice to the inner thoughts they hide from others to keep a brave face. Gallagher’s early ballad to MacKay, for example, aches with the regrets of a mother who left everything to save herself. Ditto Swinton’s goosebumps-inspiring elegy, sung like a gravelly letter penned from the heart of a woman turned ice cold with the remorse over a family left behind. It’s an unsettling note of grace that emerges from Swinton’s masterfully restrained performance. The mother might be among the last people on Earth, but she’s had the life sucked out her as Swinton portrays her akin to the walking dead. But music buoys her, if only for a cruel moment.

The boy, meanwhile, knows a sheltered life. MacKay plays him with youthful innocence and a sense of curiosity that really eggs the elders. Oppenheimer has a lot of fun with this character, styling him in a matronly ‘do to match his mother’s hair, while MacKay finds natural chemistry with Ingram to ignite sparks of tension between the generations of performers, especially through song.

These actors aren’t singers, but they’re performers and they all perform the shit out of these tunes. While many of the songs offer chilling ballads, Oppenheimer stages a few bravura numbers. One especially theatrical performance sees MacKay and Ingram dance it out amid the mountains of dust in the bunker’s tunnels. The white dust contrasts sharply with the dank surroundings, yet Oppenheimer lights it as theatrically as a Fosse number. The actors whip up the dust and surrender to the music as their characters fall in love, gracefully accepting the reality that dating options are slim at the end of the world. The dance between fantasy and reality proves especially poignant for the younger characters who seem resigned to their fate to die alone because of what their elders did to the planet.

The film’s ingenious production design by Jette Lehmann acknowledges this dance between fantasy and reality. The cavernous bunker mansion is an exquisite twist of architecture and design that shows how no expense was spared making the space luxurious and comfortable for its dwellers. But the foreboding tunnels that connect the living spaces illustrate just how vast the bunker is—and how selfish these people are. They have the space and means to house far more people—or, well, had and chose not to.

The film is admittedly bleak with this fine ensemble of generally awful people embodying the last hope for humanity. But the film leaves one buoyed with the hope personified in MacKay and Ingram’s empathetic characters. As with The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer’s direction is ambitious and against the grain. The film uses music to find the kernels of truth that these people must confront in their moral reckoning. Where Anwar Congo’s dry-heaving in Killing offers an admission of guilt, the flubbed notes and emotional quivers in the family’s lyrics offer something comparable. Call Oppenheimer’s latest “the act of killing it.”