To make his feature documentary debut The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer enlisted surviving perpetrators of the Indonesian state murder campaign of 1965-66 — thugs, torturers, killers — to discuss and re-enact the crimes they carried out against their countrymen, neighbours, and even family members.
The film and its sequel, The Look of Silence, were renowned portraits of political impunity and the complicity of everyday people in scarcely imaginable sadism and exploitation — an interest Oppenheimer continues to pursue in his feature-length fiction debut, The End, albeit by other means. Set entirely in an underground bunker complex, about a quarter-century post-apocalypse, the film explores survivor guilt arising from the accumulation of finite resources. And it’s a musical.
Several years in the making, and preceded by frame-filling title cards displaying the logos and names of dozens of funding bodies and executive producers, the film takes place entirely underground, deep in a salt mine; the cavernous set, with its white powdery whorls and ridges extending far off in a perpetual twilight, seems to have been the biggest expense. Inside the cold, cozy bunker, the walls are the blue-gray colors of the unseen sky, and in large part covered with paintings by Renoir and other masters from across the totality of art history. Fish swim in tanks and plants grow under artificial light, for dinners of dover sole and cake; there’s a lap pool, an excellent wine cellar, and enough luxury watches to circulate as gifts, and as reminders of the importance of keeping up standards of promptness and respectability. One of the first things we see in the film is an elaborate toy train set: The characters, like their director, are world-building in miniature.
Who can afford to ride out ecological and social catastrophe in such abundance? Why, the people who caused it, of course. Dad (Michael Shannon, in pleated cords and nubby sweaters) is a patrician oil executive; his son (George MacKay), has lived his whole life underground, and is learning about the world by editing his father’s memoir, which is to say he’s learning that the extraction of natural resources by multinational corporations is an engine of social progress creating infrastructure and raising standards of living all over the the developing world, and that the climate of our planet changes all the time, actually, for reasons that have nothing to do humans. Mom (Tilda Swinton) was a dancer, and now curates the art collection: as the line from De Palma’s The Black Dahlia goes, the rich don’t own art – they safeguard it, for future generations to enjoy.
The others are an ambiguous combination of friends and servants: a doctor (Lennie James); the mother’s best friend (Bronach Gallagher), also a renowned cook, who lost her own son and is nannyishly close to the kid; and a gruff dogsbody (Tim McInnerny), who, many years ago, took a bullet fending off invaders trying to breach the cave. There’s no more room at the inn, and the hard, necessary (or so everyone agrees) choices about who to include and who to exclude weigh on everyone, especially on mom, who still has old photos of her family on an iPad no one else is supposed to look at.
Everyone in the bunker can just about live with themselves, as long as they only have to live with each other. But the arrival of an outsider, a young woman (Moses Ingram) recently separated from her own family, throws things out of balance. Initially the plan is to throw her out to fend for herself, but the boy takes a liking to her. (The 32-year-old MacKay gives his 20-year-old character intermittent bursts of feral naivete, in a script with inconsistent ideas about his developmental age and emotional and intellectual maturity.)
She enlivens everyone’s existence with the hopeful blush of romantic love, and possibly, eventually, the continuation of the family bloodline. But also pierces the bubble of their self-perception, in line with the clichéd role of the nonwhite outsider who serves as a mirror revealing the main characters’ blind spots. (She and the son argue when she questions why he made the Chinese workers on the model railroad appear happy, it’s because, he says, they were making sacrifices to build something great.) Her presence reopens old wounds from the time when the survivors decided who would and would not be saved, and reveals the hollowness of their justifications for murderous inequality both before and after the collapse.
The film opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and its end credits identify the characters as “Mother,” “Father,” “Son,” and so forth, all of which is to say that Joshua Oppenheimer is a former recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. He wrote the lyrics to the songs, giving his cast of nonsingers wordy soliloquies to navigate with their largely plangent, dry and reedy voices. There’s rudimentary choreography in the musical numbers, and precious little fantasy in the stagings, aside from some lightly motivated shifts in the lighting.
In a musical, music is used to give the characters a way to express what they mean to say when the scene and the dialogue is not enough; but the film’s dramatic and philosophical framework is so schematic, its dialogue so italicized with subtext, that the songs feel superfluous as well as prosaic. Between numbers, it’s easy to forget that the film is a musical. Rumoured to have been rejected from Cannes and Venice, the two-and-a-half-hour The End seemed poised to be an apocalyptic hot mess. That it has ended up being a tepid success is almost more of a disappointment.
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