The End

Part of my coverage of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival

THE END   **

Joshua Oppenheimer

2024

IDEA:  With a global environmental catastrophe having made Earth unlivable, a formerly wealthy family survives in an underground bunker. 

BLURB:  A sanguine, starry narrative musical from the director who made a name for himself with his pair of bone-chilling documentaries on the legacy of the Indonesian genocide; this is just one of the facts that makes The End a film of bewildering choices. Consisting of a single location and a cast of seven, Oppenheimer’s fiction feature debut is downright austere for an end-of-times story, aligning it more with the intimate domestic agonies of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice or Trier’s Melancholia than most of the canon of apocalyptic cinema. Immured in their lavish underground bunker, the unnamed family of The End - formerly members of the social elite - live in the fragile delusion of their own worth, surrounding themselves with fine art and creating narratives to justify the selfishness, greed, and myopia that quite directly resulted in the end of the world. In this way, they have a strange kinship with the death squad leaders of Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and in both cases, their cognitive dissonance is unexpectedly revealed through musical numbers. Unfortunately, the songs here are pretty bland, sung unevenly in listlessly choreographed solos and duets that only compound the film’s plodding pace. The actors frankly fair better without the music, from Tilda Swinton and her tremulous self-disgust to Bronagh Gallagher’s bracingly acerbic naturalism. The cast is so uniformly strong one wishes they were working with fewer watery songs and more fully-formed ideas.