How I wanted to like The End. Not only was it made by a director I’ve admired in the past, but it also stars the most quirky Avant Garde duo you could imagine playing husband and wife; Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. Instead, the sci-fi “Last People on Earth” comedy drags so much for its two-and-half-hour run time that no character actor can save it. Oh, and it’s a musical which doesn’t make it any better.
Taking place in a future where global warming and neglectful corporations have caused raging wildfires all over the world, a group of elite wealthy individuals have found refuge in a salt mine. They are living in squalor, however. Mother (Tilda Swinton) lines their living quarters with every work of fine art you can think of. She lives there with her husband Father (Michael Shannon) and her naive and extremely sheltered child, called Son (George MacKay). With them is Mother’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), their butler (Tim McInnerny), and their doctor (Lennie James). When a young woman (Moses Ingram) finds her way into their colony, the group dynamic is completely upended, especially as the son and the girl get closer.
Joshua Oppenheimer is no stranger to ambitious projects. His 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing had war criminals reenact their crimes on camera. But unlike his past work, the point of his creative exercise isn’t clear. While I won’t give away the ending, the conclusion seems to negate all that came before it in its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
The End doesn’t seem to fully fit as a musical. The songs, written by Joshua Schmidt and Marius de Vries, bleed together. De Vries has worked as an executive music producer on pretty much every recent music-centered film you could think of including Elvis, CODA, and La La Land. He’s composed quite a bit as well including for last year’s campy A24 film Dicks. There’s enough pedigree there to at least assume there would be variety among the songs. Despite two that stand out I could not tell you which song is which. In moments, they try to emulate Stephen Sondheim, both melodically and lyrically. While interesting, it doesn’t have much of an effect and one has to wonder what was the point of it all, a question I asked repeatedly while watching.
The End feels like a vanity project, and considering this is Oppenheimer’s first narrative film and it’s been nearly a decade since his last documentary, it very well could be. While the project doesn’t work as a whole, the costumes and set design are something to marvel at, particularly a bird costume Moses Ingram wears on New Year’s Eve. George MacKay gives a very endearing performance, even giving us an almost whimsical version of Kevin Bacon’s angry dance in Footloose. Michael Shannon is hilarious as the out-of-touch billionaire trying to literally rewrite history to perceive himself in a better life. There are elements of The End that work. It’s just that the elements are not put together harmoniously.
The End will be released by NEON on Dec. 6. A trailer has not been released.
