The End: A satirical post-apocalyptic musical? It's almost as insufferable as it sounds

Telegraph

27-03-2025

Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary documentary The Act of Killing may have been released almost a decade and a half ago, but if you saw it back then, chances are its aftertaste still lingers. By turns brutally clear-sighted and queasily surreal, it had perpetrators of the Indonesian anti-communist pogroms of the 1960s not only crowing about their crimes on camera, but also staging gloating reenactments, often with bizarre theatrical flourishes. The point, at its heart, was that the only way the human soul could bear the horror of such facts was by dressing them up as fictions, thereby giving the truth an absolving gloss of falseness.
Why the recap? Because 13 years on, Oppenheimer has returned to this theme for his debut narrative feature – albeit far less convincingly, and at bafflingly extended length. The End is a satirical post-apocalyptic musical set in a billionaire's bunker buried deep in a salt mine, whose residents live in luxury, sealed off from civilisation's burning remains. Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton and George MacKay star as its main occupants: a former oil baron with a prowling, Daniel Plainview-ish air, a brittle former ballerina with the Bolshoi, and their wide-eyed 25-year-old son, whose entire life has played out in this luxurious sanctuary-slash-tomb.
The walls throng with Renoirs and Monets; the wardrobes are stocked with enviable knitwear; a butler (Tim McInnerny) and private doctor (Lennie James) are both on hand to ensure everyone's needs and wants are adequately met. The cuisine prepared by Swinton's professional chef friend (Bronagh Gallagher) couldn't be hauter. Even the gouged sides of the mine itself look acoustically optimised, like the flanks of some grand modernist konzerthalle. Perhaps that's why everyone's singing all the time.
Big, buttery golden-age showtunes, too – mostly about how lucky and lonely everyone is down here, and how hard it is to blame anyone for the planet's current hellish state. MacKay – the best thing here, though the whole cast admirably commit to the eccentric task – also helps Shannon write his presumably never-to-be-read memoirs, in which his company's role in climate change is downplayed. ('It's sheer arrogance to think we control the fate of our planet,' one line runs.)
As the survivors serenade their audience of nobody, their pitch and choreography occasionally wobbles, just to remind us that what we're watching is ultimately all for show. These poor players have all hand-picked their roles, and are resolved to strut and fret as convincingly as they can, right up until the curtain plummets.
For the first half hour or so, it's intriguing stuff – not least when Moses Ingram's mysterious outsider somehow burrows her way in, and successfully ensconces herself within the family group. But nothing resembling a plot ever gets underway, and the characters don't really change or develop: the tedium of their routine soon spills over into the viewing experience itself. Perhaps that's the idea: we should feel trapped with these self-deluding ghouls, who cloak themselves in melodious clichés and ignore the sourness of the vintage plonk uncorked at lunch. It's all meaty stuff for a think piece, but rather less swallowable as a film.
12A cert, 149 min; in cinemas from Friday March 28