Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father, and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life - until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine. As tensions rise, their seemingly idyllic existence starts to crumble.

The Garden Cinema View:

A 2.5 hour, post-apocalyptic musical does seem like a radical departure for The Act of Killing / The Look of Silence director Joshua Oppenheimer. And while The End is a distinctly peculiar watch, connective threads to those earlier documentaries begin to emerge. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer gave the executioner Anwar Congo the opportunity to create fantasy versions of his atrocities through filmmaking within several classic genre forms. Here, perhaps, he allows himself the same courtesy, working with science-fiction and the musical to explore the unspeakable weight of guilt amid an unthinkable (yet frighteningly possible) circumstance.

Oppenheimer’s use of music and the eccentric performances of his a-list cast, while not purely Brechtian, are endlessly odd enough to hold the audience in a state of curiosity. Ultimately, as with Anwar Congo and his fellow murderers, a sense of culpability appears to emerge, but with a troubling undercurrent of performative guilt.

The End hovers in a strange in-between space that is never exactly enjoyable, always fascinating, and charged with dread.    

Cast:
Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Michael Shannon