27/09/2024 - With his feature fiction debut, Joshua Oppenheimer presents a haunting post-apocalyptic allegorical operetta that sinks its teeth into the true devastations of modernity

Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon in The End

Don’t fool yourself into thinking Joshua Oppenheimer's newest film, a two-and-a-half-hour Stephen Sondheim x Jason Robert Brown (with a touch of Justin Hurwitz) post-apocalyptic operetta lovechild, is anything less daring or critical of how the global public sphere handles crises and atrocities than his previous films. With The End [+see also:
interview: Joshua Oppenheimer
film profile], the Texas-born, Copenhagen-based US filmmaker genre-jumps (nay, genre-leaps) from The Act of Killing [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2012) and its companion film, The Look of Silence [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2014, Venice Grand Jury Prize) to life after the end of the world, his characters having, in effect, caused the demise of humankind. Oppenheimer simply turns from mass killings to the interconnected Hydra of humanity: climate and neoliberal capitalism. With a script by Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg, The End is competing for the Golden Shell in San Sebastián’s Official Selection after world-premiering at the Telluride Film Festival and screening in Toronto’s Special Presentations section.

Meet the world’s last family. In the aftermath of the ultimate climate apocalypse, a former petroleum mogul (Michael Shannon) and his wife (Tilda Swinton) live a luxurious life with their young adult son (George MacKay), a butler (Tim McInnerny), a doctor (Lennie James) and the wife’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher) in a beautiful home set within the ruins of a salt mine. Pleading for shelter, a young woman (Moses Ingram) manages to penetrate the impenetrable fortress, and the family is forced to make an exception to their “us versus them” rule that has allowed no surviving person into their forever abode. As the impressionable son who grew up without ever seeing the outside world takes a liking to the more progressive young woman, who leads the son to question everything he’s been taught, the family comes face to face with a changing reality. This becomes the true struggle between “new” and “old”: not between technology and a lack thereof, but between the critical and the uncritical, the forward-looking and those clinging to a nostalgic Golden Age. 

Intended for light, unserious topics, the operetta is a perfect format to examine how humans — particularly as an intergovernmental, corporate collective — have absolved themselves of responsibility for unimaginable crises while hurtling toward a deeply unsustainable future: with a wink, a smile and a promise to “do better going forward”. Accompanying sweeping musical theatre ballads by Joshua Schmidt (and a full score by Schmidt and Marius de Vries) Oppenheimer’s lyrics border on being satirically empty, his characters singing with delicate vibrato about the need for individualism, protecting personal liberties and a repeating motif of light. Just as songs in the musical theatre medium are made for moments of extreme emotion, the problems of the family seem to be comically outweighed entirely by their wealth and privileged status: they, after all, have everything they’ll ever need, forever.

The End is anchored by MacKay, who masterfully plays the son as endearing but infantile, made to write dramatic fantasies of his father’s corporate conquests but who would rather be tumbling headfirst down piles of salt, spinning around and waving his arms as if to test the limits of his corporeal form. He is Oppenheimer’s easily mouldable block of marble, a blank slate of the world's final, prodigal son: what will be the future of humanity? The parents fancy themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, the son as God of his model train set, propped up in a room filled with Romantic landscape paintings à la Caspar David Friedrich or Ivan Aivazovsky who represent a certain ideal of Western sublime. Mikhail Krichman’s camera meanders through the home in a serpentine manner like wandering a theatrical stage set, as if to display the fallaciousness of their carefully constructed reality. But the brilliance of Oppenheimer’s plainly allegorical tale is much harder to parse than its characters reveal on first watch. The lingering question remains: it might be the end — but the end of what?

The End is a co-production between Final Cut for Real (Denmark), The Match Factory Productions GmbH (Germany), Wild Atlantic Pictures (Ireland), Dorje Film (Italy), Moonspun Films (UK) and Anagram Produktion (Sweden). The Match Factory is its managing international sales.

Photogallery 23/09/2024: San Sebastian 2024 - The End

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Joshua Oppenheimer, George MacKay, Signe Byrge Sørensen
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso