Joshua Oppenheimer was made famous by two recursive exercises of direct cinema that saw him interrogate, through both performance and observation, the personal and collective histories propagated and effaced by the perpetrators and survivors of the Indonesia mass killings. The first documentary, The Act of Killing (2012), affixed its gaze on the paramilitary gangsters who perpetrated the murders; the second, The Look of Silence (2014), shifted its focus to the families of the period’s victims. The End is Oppenheimer’s newest project, his first narrative feature, and a musical at that. It serves as an informal conclusion to the trilogy he began with The Act of Killing, in this case heightening the altitude of his inquiry to the level of the oligarchs that architected, advertently or not, a world-historical calamity.
In this generalized case, the oligarchs consist of a family: there is Man (Michael Shannon), an oil baron, who with the help of his son hopes to write a definitive story of all the good he contributed to the world; Woman (Tilda Swinton), a former ballerina who claims to have performed at the Bolshoi, and who occupies herself with rearranging the family’s art; and Boy (George MacKay), born in the darkness of the apocalypse that has ravaged the world in a series of fires and corollary catastrophes for 25 years. The family’s buried existence (their mansion-bunker is in a salt mine) is disrupted by the arrival of Girl (Moses Ingram), who threatens the harmony of the family by providing Boy a conduit to the broader world.
Audiences and critics alike have struggled to make sense of The End. In many ways, it functions in the tradition of Dancer in the Dark (2000) and Annette (2021): anti-musicals, whose flux into song and dance occurs not in the interest of speaking to some higher emotional truth that cannot be contained by the spoken word, but as the terminus of the very delusion that the characters struggle to speak into being.
In the following interview with Joshua, which has been edited for clarity and length, he and I discuss the friction between what is language and meaning; that is, the critical “location of being” that makes The End so confounding, unsettling, and, ultimately, distinctive.
Conor Truax: One thing I’ve been curious about is the clear genealogy you’ve established with your previous two feature-length documentaries, focusing on personal and collective histories. In those films, you examined world-historical events from the perspectives of both the perpetrators and the victims. In The End, we’re looking at the family of an oligarch, someone you were inspired by in Indonesia, building his own salt mine compound. The practical necessity of moving toward a narrative feature is clear, but some might find it striking that you chose to tell this story as a musical. When did it become clear to you that you wanted to develop a musical, and how did you think it fit with the film’s ideas?
Joshua Oppenheimer: Right from the start. The film has to be a musical — it’s about delusion and denial. Without the musical aspect, it would just be a bleak, apocalyptic tale of a family struggling to survive an extreme version of the catastrophe we seem to be careening toward.
I visited the bunker of an oligarch — someone not from Indonesia, but elsewhere in Asia because I couldn’t return to Indonesia. I was dying to ask him how he’d cope with the guilt of his role in the catastrophe he saw coming. He was an oil man, and he believed that climate change would eventually lead to war, even nuclear war, and make the world uninhabitable. I wanted to ask how he would cope with his guilt and leaving people behind, but I didn’t know him well enough to ask that. On the way home, I watched one of my favorite musicals, and it became an epiphany: I would make a musical set in the bunker.
For me, musicals are about delusion. Watching golden-age musicals moves me, but I also cry because I’m horrified at the delusion on display and the tragic consequences of it. I wanted to make a film that explores the consequences of self-deception, not just in an apocalyptic context, but in our present lives. The characters in the film are nameless because they represent all of us. The film might seem set in the future, but it’s really about our present, and how we isolate ourselves by focusing on our private concerns, cutting ourselves off from the broader human family.
Every time we define ourselves narrowly, we place ourselves in a bunker, just like this family does.
CT: Right. I know you’ve mentioned Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a favorite musical of yours. It’s interesting because musicals are often seen as avenues for transcendent truth, yet in The End, music becomes a medium for delusion. Musicals are also having a moment right now; Umbrellas has recently been restored. How did you approach the process of writing the script and lyrics? Did you develop the lyrics in tandem with the film’s plot, or did the plot come first?
JO: We wrote the script first, in part because I wanted a writing partner to help me get started right away, since I hadn’t written a feature-length drama before. We spent a lot of time finding the right composer, and a consulting composer, Jeanine Tesori, encouraged us to make guesses about where songs might fit and refine those guesses as the script took shape.
We realized that the driving force behind the characters singing in the end was doubt and anxiety — the crisis of having illusions pierced by truth. The songs became desperate efforts to regain equilibrium, to distract and console themselves. They’re like breakdowns on film, where characters, adrift in stormy seas, try to cobble together a life raft from fragments of melody and harmony. These songs are beautifully luminous, but the truth screams through in the gaps — the silences, the rests, the pauses in the music. The truth emerges in those moments.
CT: I loved the film’s Kafkaesque elements — especially the tonal friction between what the characters sing and the expressions on their faces. George’s performance, especially at the end, was outstanding. How did you balance the risk of didacticism with the need to express the film’s political and thematic ideas, especially since this is your first time making a musical?
JO: The structure of the film is in the writing, not the editing. Watching the film, I was struck by how evocative it is of golden-age musicals, which evoke an idealized vision of America and Western civilization. It’s heartbreaking because that ideal is exactly what the MAGA movement is nostalgic for. The stylization of the film didn’t make it kitschy — it made it heartbreaking.
One of the essential aspects of my work is confronting escapism. Kundera talks about two types of tears: one for the sweetness of a child playing, and another when you cry for humanity itself. That second tear is sentimental, and it’s always escapist. In today’s world, we cry over tragedies, like people drowning in the Mediterranean, but then post a tearful emoji, which allows us to turn away and focus on something more diverting. We do exactly what Mother does at the end of her big solo in the film. We do exactly what Father does when he gets up from his little suicide jump and starts dancing again. We willingly place ourselves in the bunker. And the purpose of this entire film is to bring viewers through the experience, through the journey from tragedy to kitsch, to the deepest tragedy, which is recognizing the awful consequences of sentimentality and escapism itself.
CT: I felt that deeply in the film. It evokes a feeling I’ve only had with one other film, Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate. Some criticism of the film has mentioned that it lacks political or historical context, in stark contrast to your previous work. How do you respond to that?
JO: It’s an allegory, but I don’t think the claim that the human family is an oligarchy is apolitical. I don’t think the film suggests we’re living in a future that’s historical in the traditional sense — it appears about the future, but it’s really about the present. The claim that we’re living through an escalating ecological catastrophe, worsened by ignoring the issue, is not apolitical or ahistorical. The nuances of the film address history, particularly in the diorama of American history. The arrival of the young Black woman is a metaphorical vision for America that immediately makes the movie about whiteness in a country built on enslavement. These references are political and historical. I remember reading that same person finding The Act of Killing ahistorical. It’s tricky to pick a phrase from criticism and deduce what worldview it fits, but I feel it’s urgently political.
The film is a cautionary tale, made from the perspective that it may be too late for this family, as it is for any family contributing to the world’s demise. There would be something grotesque in offering them redemption or a happy ending. It’s a tragedy about all of us because we are all closer to that family than we realize, and to the perpetrators of the climate catastrophe, even if we can’t afford bunkers. It’s a cautionary tale filled with hope, optimism, and activism — believing we still have time to heed its warning.
At the film’s end, the mother and girl lie to themselves, saying, “Once the world was full of strangers, we kept our distance, trusted no one, stared into the abyss, faded into the cosmos,” which transitions into the microcosmos. Then, the reprise of the opening music plays over the credits, showing names of those involved in the film — Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Michael Shannon, Moses Ingram, the sound designer, composer, writer, director, producers. This is integral because we end this hopeless tale with a gesture of acknowledgment: these people, in this historical moment, are politically intervening in history. As Walter Benjamin said, the historian’s task is to capture the present in a moment of danger so that people can grasp it and act. This is the definition of political and historical filmmaking.
CT: That’s a great point. The film has a distinct American quality, but it’s told in a way that’s atypical of Hollywood. There’s a lot of nuance, especially in the character of Moses Ingram. As you look to the future, where do you see your work moving?
JO: Making this film, I did a lot of meditation to cope with the anxiety of it. The Act of Killing gave me nightmares and insomnia, so I started meditating to make sure I could sleep during The End’s production. That gave me time to think about what consciousness is — what we are, the universe coming to know itself.
We are this mystery waking up and coming to know itself. Perhaps for the first time. We have to take care because there’s every possibility that the universe could slip back into sleep. I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing next, but I imagine that it’s going to be engaged with trying to understand this fundamental mystery of what we are and elevating it into something that we can resonate with harmonically (not to say musically). I’m just saying the way a resonator gets things vibrating and appreciated deeply, lest we don’t cherish it and let it go, slipping back into slumber.
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