Review: ‘The End’ is a postapolcalyptic musical family drama
By Ty Burr / The Washington Post
“The End” fits right in with a movie year of major follies (“Megalopolis”) and big swings (“Emilia Pérez”). It’s a 2½-hour postapocalyptic musical that takes place in a bunker deep underground among the last surviving family on Earth.
And some of the questions it answers are: Can Michael Shannon sing? (Yes, and ably enough to survive karaoke night at his local bar.) Also: What happens when a gifted documentarian tries his hand at fiction?
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, Bronagh Gallagher, Lennie James, Tim McInnerny, Moses Ingram, Mary Tyrone.
Rating: Unrated
That director is Joshua Oppenheimer, whose brilliant pair of movies about the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s were both Oscar-nominated (and both times lost out to pop music documentaries, poor guy).
Oppenheimer audaciously confronted the aging killers of the 1965-1966 Suharto regime with genre reenactments of their own crimes in “The Act of Killing” (2012) and with one of their victim’s unyielding relatives in “The Look of Silence” (2014). Co-writing with Denmark’s Rasmus Heisterberg (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), he continues to mix-master mash-up techniques in his first narrative movie whenever one of his characters opens their mouth to express their thoughts, dreams and regrets in song.
Does it work? No, except for when it does. The family in “The End” has been living in its elegantly furnished multiroom bunker at the bottom of a salt mine for 20 years, long enough for Son (George MacKay of “1917”) to grow to adulthood without ever having seen the world upstairs. Father (Shannon) is a button-down patriarch whose work in the oil industry has had something to do with the unspecified Armageddon that has destroyed the planet. And Mother (Tilda Swinton) is a neurasthenic people-pleaser living in a fog of denial, medications and old-master paintings she insists on constantly rearranging.
The other inhabitants of this netherworld are: Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), an acquaintance of Mother’s who has become Son’s one confidante over the years; Doctor (Lennie James), who subjects everyone to health checks and occasional verbal abuse; and Butler (Tim McInnerny), who is a butler. Into their privileged Eden, sustained by a farm-aquarium setup for food, comes Girl (Moses Ingram), a survivor from topside who upends the family’s delicate dynamic and reveals the latticework of lies that keep them from coming apart at the seams.
The musical numbers are part of those lies, the characters bursting into songs with lyrics like “together our future is bright!” as if to will away the unthinkable. Oppenheimer’s lyrics, set to music by Joshua Schmidt (stage musicals “Adding Machine” and “Midwestern Gothic”), have a sub-Sondheimian lilt to them, but the melodies are unmemorable and sometimes more recitative than song. These people are quite literally whistling in the dark.
When the filmmaker’s Big Idea clicks, it can make for a powerfully touching sense of loss. That’s the case in a duet where Son coaches Father into a memory, perhaps invented, of his first meeting with Mother. MacKay gives the strongest performance in “The End,” in part because his character is the one person who dramatically evolves, his love for Girl forcing him to confront the myths he’s been told since childhood about his parents’ moral purity and Father’s responsibility for the disasters that continue to unfold overhead.
Father and Mother, by contrast, wilt under the fresh air and brute realities Girl brings with her. And Oppenheimer finds drama the same way he did in his twin documentaries — by letting complacent evil come face to face with itself until it can no longer deny the truth. Shannon is good in a seeming change of pace from his hyperintense roles, and Swinton gives Mother’s dissolution a wracked pathos, as if Mary Tyrone, the addict matriarch of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” had wandered into a Mad Max movie. Ingram is excellent as Girl, coping with her own load of survivor’s guilt, but the fact that she’s Black and the family is upper-class White is left either unexplored or so subtextual that it’s in the sub-subbasement.
In the end, Son is the only person here who’s never lived in the real world, has never had to make a choice and is therefore free from guilt — except for that which he’s inherited, a notion that gives “The End” a dawning undertow of horror even beyond its postapocalyptic setting. Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.