Melissa Anderson
Oblique horrors and unsettling vulnerabilities abound in Joshua Oppenheimer’s musical film about a wealthy family living in a luxurious bunker during climate apocalypse.
Tim McInnerny as Butler, Michael Shannon as Father, George MacKay as Son, Tilda Swinton as Mother, Bronagh Gallagher as Friend, and Lennie James as Doctor in The End. Courtesy Neon.
The End, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer,
now playing in theaters
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A passage that’s never been far from my mind since I first read it last year comes from a piece on the German writer Paul Scheerbart by Gary Indiana, found in his 2022 essay collection Fire Season: “Scheerbart is proof of Jack Smith’s aperçu that much of the best art treats existence and its problems with a delicate, nuanced, unpretentious touch—and is relegated to obscurity because Western culture trains us, insensibly, to equate bombast, heaviness, and Wagnerian overkill with importance and seriousness.” Indiana’s characteristically shrewd assessment is especially pertinent when applied to the film-release schedule in the final quarter of the year, when soi-disant prestige cinema—often, bloated biopics, gaseous historical dramas, or clamorous “message” movies about contemporary life and its ills—crowds into theaters.
Exhibiting the qualities Indiana extols, Joshua Oppenheimer’s strange, haunting The End, his first feature-length narrative, opened two weeks ago to very little notice, drowned out by the stomping and trumpeting of so many white elephants. I must confess that the synopsis of Oppenheimer’s film I read before attending a press screening last month had me braced for another of these cine-pachyderms: it is a musical about a cosseted family that survives a climate apocalypse. Yet The End progresses from scene to scene with grace and intelligence, viewers never quite knowing what to expect next. The movie’s finesse is all the more surprising considering it is made by the same man whose best-known work—the outrageously lauded 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, in which those who participated in the Indonesian politicide of 1965–1966 reenact their slaughter—ranks among the most morally repugnant nonfiction films I’ve ever seen.
Tilda Swinton as Mother and Michael Shannon as Father in The End. Courtesy Neon.
The End, which Oppenheimer cowrote with Rasmus Heisterberg, unfolds like a fable, its elemental nature underscored by the fact that the characters—a mere eight people make up the entire cast—are never addressed by name and are referred to in the credits by only the most generic terms. For the past twenty-five years, following an unspecified human-made catastrophe, Father (Michael Shannon), a one-time oil-industry executive; Mother (Tilda Swinton), his wife, who once danced with the Bolshoi; and Son (George MacKay), their guileless young-adult only child, have lived in a luxe bunker deep in a salt mine. The ménage also includes a support staff: a cook (Bronagh Gallagher), Mother’s best friend; a physician (Lennie James); and a butler (Tim McInnerny).
George MacKay as Son in The End. Courtesy Neon.
Only Son, who was born after the disaster in that underground palace, has no recollection of the world before its collapse. Yet he is reminded daily of the splendors the natural world once held thanks to the majestic landscape portrayed in Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, California, one of the scores of great nineteenth-century paintings hung salon-style in the living room, fussily tended to by Mother. Obsessed with the past, twentysomething Son is first seen adding to his ever-expanding diorama depicting American milestones, complete with tiny replications of Civil War battles, the Hollywood sign, and the moon landing. As he tinkers, he sings: “A fire, a tree, a horse / And a house / An Indian, of course / And a settler, a slave, a snowman / A cat, a cloud, a moose / And a windmill, a blizzard, a caboose.” This bizarre inventory, a collection of mostly benign nouns scattered with those that evoke very specific horrors, typifies the film’s approach to addressing baleful chapters in history: not through self-righteous browbeating but incongruity and irony.
Tilda Swinton as Mother in The End. Courtesy Neon.
That history also includes the film’s quite recent past (or, put another way, our grim present), when dirty-energy malefactors hastened humanity’s extinction. “To think this all leads to us,” trills fossil-fuel fetishist Father, proudly gazing at his child’s densely detailed tableau. The patriarch’s triumphalist boast is made all the more absurd by the pitiful number behind that “us”: a plutocratic trio and their three aides, the lone survivors—or so they think—of a global cataclysm, each person one day closer to their own expiration.
But the cloistered coterie is soon shocked to discover the Girl (Moses Ingram), collapsed on the floor of the salt mine. At first planning to murder her, as long-established protocol dictates—“They always try to kill us,” Father says, referring to those who had previously breached their lair, a trespass that last occurred twenty years ago—the family ultimately decides to take her in. But they never let the Girl, who is about Son’s age and is wracked with survivor’s guilt, having broken away from her own kin to flee to safety, forget their benevolence in sparing her life. The chasm between their backgrounds and legacies (the Girl is Black; Mother, Father, and Son are white) is never mentioned directly but obliquely alluded to. Showing off his mini-US to the Girl, Son calls her attention to the microscopic Chinese migrants laying down tracks for the transcontinental railroad. She is utterly perplexed: “You made them look happy.”
Moses Ingram as Girl in The End. Courtesy Neon.
Oppenheimer has cited Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a key influence on The End, and the two films compare and contrast in fascinating ways. Famously, every single word in the 1964 musical is sung, a mode that elevates the most pedestrian speech (like a gas-station attendant’s query “Super or regular?”) to the sublime. That’s not the case with Oppenheimer’s movie, in which a dozen or so songs are interspersed throughout normal, spoken dialogue. As with Demy’s film, though, the lyrics (written by Oppenheimer, with music by Joshua Schmidt) tend toward everyday language, incorporating recitative and more formally composed numbers. Part of what makes Umbrellas so transcendent is its aural beauty: the main performers are dubbed by extraordinary vocalists. In The End, all the actors do their own singing, their untrained, reedy voices adding pathos to their verses—a vulnerability accorded to everyone, from the most ignominious character to the least. This empathy, however, does not equal exculpation.
What most strongly unites Umbrellas and The End is the catalyzing horror that is central to each but is never explicitly shown. In the earlier film, the blossoming romance between Guy and Geneviève is sundered, their lives irrevocably changed, when he is called to fight in Algeria (the war having concluded just the year before Umbrellas began production). Demy’s movie never leaves Cherbourg, but the atrocities taking place in North Africa are made visceral via a line in a postcard from Guy to his sweetheart: “It is strange how sun and death travel together.” Similarly, we never witness the conflagrations raging just outside the family’s obscenely opulent shelter in The End. We see what Son—shielded from the grotesque realities of his father’s profession his entire life—sees and laments in song: “salt, dead and white.”
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.