One of the more indelible sequences in Joshua Oppenheimer’s breakthrough documentary, The Act of Killing, features one of its subjects, the Indonesian paramilitary thug Anwar Congo, starring in a music video set to “Born Free.” During the brief scene, the cheerful, elderly man, having long since skated on the murders of allegedly a thousand Communist sympathizers, is valorized through song, and the horror for the viewer is as much in his complete lack of remorse — the video features re-enactors dressed as prisoners lifting garrotes from their necks — as it is the realization that this person would never face justice for participating in a genocide. For his narrative debut, The End, Oppenheimer appears to have taken considerable inspiration from this musical number and the feelings it inspired in those who watched it, transposing the dramatic device onto the fictional head of an energy company and his family who, having hastened a global ecological disaster that’s killed off most of the planet, live out the rest of their days in isolation and luxury in a fortified vault-cum-residence built into the side of a mountain. Still waited on by a live-in staff and surrounded by the trappings of culture and comfort, these people will occasionally pause their daily routines, turn their heads slightly skyward and break into song and dance to give voice to their inner yearnings and desires, which unsurprisingly fail to consider the billions dead or dying outside their doors. It’s an attention-grabbing conceit, no doubt, but one arguably better-suited to 2 minutes of screen time than 150.
We meet the unnamed family (all the actors are credited simply by their function in the group dynamic) a couple decades into bunker life and entirely adjusted to being the last vestiges of civilization — and, very likely, humanity itself. The youngest member of the family, a 20-something son (George MacKay, with all the wide-eyed zeal of someone homeschooled by a climate change denialist who’s also never met another person his own age), has lived his entire life in seclusion. In between chores, swimming laps in a private pool, and training exercises, he helps his former oil tycoon dad (Michael Shannon) write his rose-tinted memoir despite no one being alive to read it. Meanwhile, mom (Tilda Swinton) fusses over wall placement for her collection of classical art and crafting paper flowers with her best friend (Bronagh Gallagher, seemingly allowed a spot in the “ark” because she was a Michelin star chef as much as her role as an emotional support human). There is also a butler and doctor milling about, however we learn that when society collapsed and the family locked themselves inside to weather the end times, they ruthlessly excluded relatives, friends, and business associates (to say nothing of the untold masses desperate to survive the atmosphere being set aflame) at the expense of keeping themselves safe and comfortable. And yes, like a bunch of Disney heroines, the family will occasionally ponder the lives they once lived — or in the case of MacKay’s character, never actually experienced — and belt out original songs that qualify as the closest any of these people have ever come to examining their extraordinary good fortune.
It’s a life of stasis and habit that, for all the concern of outside threats, is never actually intruded upon. That is until, without explanation, a young woman (Moses Ingram) penetrates their security measures and stumbles into the mountain lair — which, from a production design standpoint, resembles the rebel base on Hoth — introducing a new variable and puncturing the carefully maintained bubble of ignorance to the suffering of the outside world. With opinions initially split on what to do with her — mom is adamantly opposed to letting her stay, desperately clinging to the fig leaf that their previous callousness was for the “good of the family,” while dad belatedly realizes that excluding new blood from their contingency plan has condemned them to a future without heirs — the young woman is allowed to remain in their care on a probationary basis. Despite her enthusiasm to fit in and follow the “house rules,” she can’t help but reflect on the harrowing circumstances of her upbringing in a barren wasteland, the family she was forced to abandon, and the desire to connect her sense of loss to that of her new hosts, which initially is treated with studied indifference and eventually withering — by WASP standards, anyway — reprimands (“careful, you can easily cross a line”).
The central tension of The End is when the learned compartmentalization will finally give way and whether enough cracks will emerge for these people to finally confront the evil they’ve done (or at least directly benefited from). To its credit, the film gets awfully far on audaciousness alone, with even the decision to cast actors without regard for their pipes a sly acknowledgement of the characters’ privilege (after all, they didn’t survive the apocalypse because they were the most talented singers; they sing because there’s no one else left to). The songs themselves aren’t especially memorable — there’s nary an earworm in the bunch — but they do have the appropriate shape of myopic, vaguely stirring ballads, each one more tone deaf (in a couple different senses) than the last. And whether it’s Swinton looking for someone to blame for chipped paintings while the world burns outside, Shannon comforting himself over the Nigerian orphanages he built to care for all the children of workers who died in industrial accidents at one of his job sites, or MacKay’s stunted youthful defiance arriving at the natural endpoint of wanting to run away (“to where?” one is inclined to ask), there’s no shortage of soft underbelly to attack. But the metaphor never evolves over an enervating two and a half hours, with the film never deviating from askance detachment; for all the orchestra swells and choreographed dancing, The End remains as clinical as an ant farm. Oppenheimer’s approach is so dependent on these characters remaining uninterrogated and ultimately unfazed by their monstrous behavior that it fosters stagnation. There’s something principled in eschewing cheap epiphanies and out-of-character transformations, but the self-delusion is so steadfast, the immunization from empathy so unwavering, that you can watch any 20 minutes of the film at random and get the entire gist of what it’s going for. At one point late in the film the characters gather to celebrate the New Year, and it almost feels like a perverse joke on the audience: here are the fireworks that have been promised, although almost certainly not the ones you had in mind.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 1.
