Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, one family clings to a sense of normalcy while confined to a palatial bunker. Wealthy ex-ballerina Mother, former oil executive Father, their precocious Son (and a chosen few companions) keep a happy routine. But when a Girl turns up at their underground doorstep, with her own past and a plain-spoken perspective, the group’s blind optimism begins to unravel. As long-repressed emotions resurface, and a connection blossoms between the outsider and the Son, a changed existence becomes the only way forward.
The Garden Cinema View:
A 2.5 hour, post-apocalyptic musical does seem like a radical departure for The Act of Killing / The Look of Silence director Joshua Oppenheimer. And while The End is a distinctly peculiar watch, connective threads to those earlier documentaries begin to emerge. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer gave the executioner Anwar Congo the opportunity to create fantasy versions of his atrocities through filmmaking within several classic genre forms. Here, perhaps, he allows himself the same courtesy, working with science-fiction and the musical to explore the unspeakable weight of guilt amid an unthinkable (yet frighteningly possible) circumstance.
Oppenheimer’s use of music and the eccentric performances of his a-list cast, while not purely Brechtian, are endlessly odd enough to hold the audience in a state of curiosity. Ultimately, as with Anwar Congo and his fellow murderers, a sense of culpability appears to emerge, but with a troubling undercurrent of performative guilt.
The End hovers in a strange in-between space that is never exactly enjoyable, always fascinating, and charged with dread.
