The End

Were a man to find himself one of the last humans left standing on a ravaged earth, surely one of the first questions he must ask himself is just what to talk about with those who survive with him. Or better yet, what not to talk about. Too much contemplation could, after all, invite questions about just how he came to live when others did not. It’s a matter that the unnamed recluse played by Michael Shannon in Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic chamber piece/Golden Age musical melodrama has long laid to rest. The past and the world of before are long gone, and there’s nothing to be done about that. Within the blandly refined interiors of the underground bunker to which he, his wife (Tilda Swinton) and naïve, bunker-born son (George MacKay) reside, to live is to forget, and forgetting is work that takes all day, every day.

It’s from this spare set-up that the film’s musical numbers – courtesy of Joshua Schmidt, Marius de Vries and Oppenheimer – emerge, that dreamiest of genres giving voice to the delusions keeping this unit afloat. It’s an intriguing proposition to set a musical in an underground bunker, if only because the cramped confines thoroughly refute the freedom of movement so key to a musical’s joys. On the face of it, the seeming clash of form and function ought to be productive. In execution, it can look like the cast slowly pacing from one end of the same dining room and office space to another, and then again, all the while dolefully speak-singing. More than its themes of complicity and denial, the most challenging thing about Oppenheimer’s film can be getting a handle on how much the intensely low-energy register in which it operates is intentional.

Over 148 exhausting minutes, the gloominess never abates, not even with the arrival of a haunted newcomer (Moses Ingram) to the estate. This is no doubt intended. Our characters may fool themselves with the hopelessness of their state, but we can see it plainly. It’s surely no less intentional that the songs are wearyingly one-note, the better to match the monotony of bunker life; Oppenheimer’s bluntly declamatory lyrics the better for taking the sparkle out of this song of the damned. Is The End, perhaps, meant to be wholly without a narrative engine, as the story is already all but over?

With his acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer found illumination within the stasis of his subjects. As the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66 cheerfully re-enacted their acts dressed in movie gangster garb, they revealed themselves to the audience over and over. The deluded and unremorseful are under a similar microscope here, but Oppenheimer cannot find that same richness in stasis that he did in non-fiction. Still, he cares for this hopeless lot, to a degree. One never doubts that the director’s heart is in the material, though ours might not be, and that goes some way towards turning a foible into a fascination. For whatever else can be said about The End, it has the courage of its convictions.

Thomas Messner

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