Is art where we find truth, or where we project our delusions? In his dual Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invited participants in the 1956-66 Indonesian genocide to re-enact their crimes as theatre. A family member of one of the victims watches some of the footage. He, the audience, and Oppenheimer all seem to be in search of the same thing: some spark of humanity within the monstrosity, some morsel of understanding of how those who commit evil deeds live with the aftermath.
With The End, the director now takes that same, desperate search to the fictional space. Several decades into a climate apocalypse, a billionaire family live deep in a salt mine, in the compact luxury of a survival bunker. And they’ve been granted the gift of song. The End is a musical, though an uncanny spectre of one – artificial skin stretched over the rotted bones of an old MGM spectacular.
The abandoned caverns surrounding their home become a soundstage for George McKay, the family’s only son, cavorting and twirling his arms like a windmill. When he stands atop an outcrop, cinematographer Mikhail Krichman wraps him in golden rays, as if dawn were breaking on an Oklahoma farmstead, while music composed by Joshua Schmidt (with lyrics by Oppenheimer) swells in the background. But it’s all a cruel joke. He’s quite literally dancing on the grave of civilisation. The family sing about bright futures, shame, and regret, while we’re left to pick apart their words, expressions, and actions for some glimmer of sincerity. It’s a natural compulsion.
As the oil tycoon patriarch of the clan (Michael Shannon) wonders whether he can ever be forgiven for the time he struck his dog as a child, we know he really means forgiveness for his greed. And how exactly does he intend to achieve that when those who could actually grant him forgiveness are most likely dead because of him? The mother (Tilda Swinton, elegant and rigid, like a heron suffering a psychotic break) spends her time wondering whether it’s a little too “kitschy” to put a Monet in the living room. It’s funny, in a deeply grotesque way. No line is ever directly played for laughs by Shannon, Swinton, or McKay, their selfish myopia reading naturally as true to life. But, as they say, you have to laugh or else you’ll cry.
The family’s dubious tranquillity is suddenly disrupted when a young woman (Moses Ingram) appears, armed with stories of famine and painful sacrifices. She’s open about the guilt she carries and, even if her circumstances are entirely different to the family’s, it starts to unsettle their manicured routine. Swinton’s character suddenly starts to remember all the family she left behind.
It’s here that The End starts to shift into interrogation mode. The bunker’s staff – butler (Tim McInnerny), chef (Bronagh Gallagher) and doctor (Lennie James) – are no longer that nebulous, insidious concept of employed “family” but individuals with their own lives and histories. Jette Lehmann’s sets and Frauke Firl’s costumes create their own, pointed narrative. The world starts ice blue, only for the red of blood, life, and bodies to slowly creep in.
But, there’s no room for the sentimental here. No Grinch hearts suddenly grow three sizes. That’s not how it works in the real world, and Oppenheimer is interested instead in the smaller, more subtle shifts. He ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. All that we’re left with for certain is the seductive, chilling allure of the delusions built by the guilty.
Dir: Joshua Oppenheimer. Starring: Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James, Michael Shannon. Cert 12A, 149 minutes
