THE END (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

The End, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

A good song in a musical can brighten one's day or put things in the right perspective—not only for the audience, but also for the characters who feel compelled to break into song in the first place. Characters in a musical don't just sing for the benefit of the audience, after all. They're singing because words alone will not suffice in that moment, and the characters in The End have plenty of need for cheering up and for finding the proper point of view to get through the darkness of their lives. For all they know, they are the last people alive on Earth.

Co-writer/director Joshua Oppenheimer, who is best known as a documentarian and makes his narrative feature debut with this movie, has made this story about a family, as well as a few others close to them, living in an apartment built amidst a salt mine. Above them, the world is in ruins—literally on fire from burning oil wells that spread across the globe, caused in some way, it seems, by climate change. The nature of the apocalypse is of little matter to these people, since they did escape its deadly impact by taking shelter in this place. They have left everyone else, even people they knew and loved, to die.

One understands Oppenheimer and co-screenwriter Rasmua Heisterberg's impulse to transform this material into a musical. For one thing, the limited setting of the apartment and the wide expanse of the mine looks and often feels like a stage, but on a more fundamental level, these characters cannot and often will not put their complex emotions into words. It's simply too much to bear for some of them, especially since it's arguable that they're only in this safe place because of the wealth gained from causing the environmental disaster raging above them.

Father (Michael Shannon), as we soon learn, was the head of an energy company, meaning, when the world was relatively fine, he profited from the oil that's currently burning above him. He has spent his life believing his business was worthwhile, because it made him lots of money—enough to build and stock this shelter so that he and his family would be comfortable beyond the foreseeable future—and it also made other people's lives better.

While he's stuck in the shelter, Father is overseeing the writing of his biography, offering those claims and still insisting that he cannot be blamed for the devastation his industry led to. It's more for his benefit, obviously, because no one remains to read his justifications, except the family who already know them too well.

The man's son, known only as Son and played by George MacKay, is the one actually doing the writing, by the way, and he becomes the center of this little story about wrestling with grief and guilt until it has been pressed down into submission. Son has learned that well from his parents, his father and Mother (Tilda Swinton), and that has affected the way he comprehends the world he has never seen. He was born in the mine, and based on projections, he'll be dead before the oil fires stop burning.

These three characters, along with a trio—Doctor (Lennie James), Butler (Tim McInnerny), and Mother's best friend (played by Bronagh Gallagher)—of others, sing a lot here, in songs with lyrics by Oppenheimer and composed by Joshua Schmidt. No one will leave the movie humming any of these tunes, and that seems to be the point. There's nothing particularly cheerful about a sextet of people trying to ward off despair with a jovial song, just as there's no particular passion in a song about trying to come to terms with leaving so many family members, friends, and strangers die in a horrifying apocalypse.

The problem, perhaps, is that the characters are completely sincere when they do sing, while Oppenheimer uses the gimmick as a kind of mocking critique of them. The whole movie is ironic, really, because the musical element puts an even greater distance between us and this family than the characters' inherent privilege and denial already does. They want to be sympathetic. Indeed, they need to be, in order to rationalize why they lived while billions died. We get the point without the songs, and there are lots of songs in this, dragging out the story and repeating the same points the movie makes repeatedly between the tunes.

More intriguing than the gimmick is a visitor, known only as Girl and played by Moses Ingram, to the shelter. She has somehow survived and left behind her family before finding her way to the mine. Despite wanting and trying to kill the stranger at first, the family takes her in, warms up to her (as much as any of them can), and are challenged, for once, by this new perspective. Son finds the challenge especially tantalizing and falls in love.

The setup of the conflicts in The End is fascinating enough, while the performances get at the core of characters who have lied so much to themselves that even a hint of truth is too much to endure. Turning that story into a musical makes theoretical sense, but in practice, it becomes a barrier of irony that's simply too, too much.

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