The End makes an unlikely mix of musical and post-apocalyptic family drama, at VIFF Centre to December 21

Everything is heightened in Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling parody of privilege and willful ignorance

By Janet Smith

Tilda Swinton in The End.

The End is at VIFF Centre to December 21

A MOVIE MUSICAL set at the end of the world, miles underground in an abandoned salt mine? With unlikely stars like Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton in the singing roles, and props that include a massive toy train set and walls full of the world’s most famous oil paintings?

It’s a concept that could only have come from the mind of Joshua Oppenheimer, the man behind the genre-breaking documentary The Act of Killing, in which the director persuaded several of Indonesia’s genocidal killers to reenact their crimes on camera in often-musical cinematic moments.

As far as The End, though it may not make too many lists of best films of 2024, it will certainly top any tally of the year’s weirdest offerings. It works best on a level of chilling absurdity—as a heightened and brutally timely parody of privilege, and the people who focus on their wine and wallpaper as the world burns.

Here, Mother (a perfectly coiffed Swinton) and Father (Shannon) have raised Son (George MacKay) to be blissfully ignorant of the carnage that went down on doomsday—their man-child busy building trainsets that re-create an idealized version of the old world, the matriarch forever re-hanging art and repainting walls. They all live in strange and carefully orchestrated denial (with the help of a butler, a doctor, and family friend) until a woman arrives from the outside (Moses Ingram, hands down the film’s best singer).

Oppenheimer tries to subvert the musical form, the songs and occasional dance not so much moving the plot along as alternately expressing the upbeat lies the characters tell themselves (“we thrive in our happily ever after”) or the emotions they’re trying to repress; wait till you see Shannon enact the world’s most depressing soft shoe routine.

The End looks great, the surrounds of the saltmine a wavy world that resembles sculptural snowdrifts. Tonally, it’s tougher to sort out—by turns deadpan, affected, and melancholic. If you are curious, want to see something utterly audacious and different, and have two-and-a-half hours to spare, it’s a fascinating experience that feels a bit like Samuel Beckett somehow bumped into Andrew Lloyd Webber at an indie screening of Melancholia.  

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