The End is the darkest Hollywood musical of all time

This early review of The end comes from the Toronto International Film Festival. It will be updated for the film’s theatrical release in December 2024.

When The end At the beginning, a wealthy industrialist family of three (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and George MacKay) have lived in a spacious underground bunker with their helpful staff for 20 years while society collapses around them. Humanity is all but lost. But the arrival of a mysterious survivor forces them to question their rules and the stories they tell themselves about their own role in the global apocalypse. Mostly they do this through song and dance.

In a bizarre but effective mix of genres and styles, the hype of the golden age of Hollywood meets the dark dystopia of Children of men. Trust documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer to shoot the darkest musical in the world; as the director behind The act of killing And The look of silencea pair of vital, harrowing works on the Indonesian genocide in the 1960sit couldn’t have gone any other way. The result is a claustrophobic introspection of guilt and remorse that hardly sounds like suitable material for a grandiose film musical. But Oppenheimer’s focused approach to human drama makes it sing.

The leads play easily identifiable types, all so broad that their characters don’t even get names: In the credits, they’re listed simply as Mother (Swinton), Father (Shannon), and Boy (MacKay). This last stronghold of humanity revolves around this trio. Mother is often tired and irritable; she’s fed up with her life, but she understandably has no other choice. So she spends her time repairing and tinkering with the many famous Impressionist paintings she brought with her decades ago, hanging them wall to wall in her lavish living room until everything feels right.

Father, meanwhile, distracts himself from his loveless marriage by writing his autobiography, which deals with his part in the climate crisis that has pushed humanity to the brink of disaster, but insists that his good deeds outweighed his sins and that perhaps he wasn’t particularly guilty after all.

And then there’s Boy, who, unlike the film’s other characters, has no memory or concept of the world above. Born in the bunker, this naive, awkward twentysomething knows only the decorated hallways, efficient food-growing labs, and the handful of icy caves that surround him. He’s a history buff who’s been taught to avoid complicated political entanglements, and his understanding of the world is purely conceptual, so he breathes life into dioramas of human (especially American) achievements, from westward expansion to the moon landing.

Boy also gets the film’s first musical number, which provides all kinds of aesthetic and conceptual whiplash. He sings optimistically about a sunrise, something he’s never seen before and can only imitate by shining a flashlight on his tiny figures. The mid-20th century orchestra builds up as it would for a standard hopeful “I want…” number about the dreams of a characterbut the crescendo never comes, and Oppenheimer’s uninterrupted shots never reach their full formal grandeur. Nor is it possible, given the physical limitations of the bunker.

Remarkably, this post-apocalyptic setting is also layered and highly utilitarian, considering who’s at the helm. The family is outnumbered by their household helpers: their gourmet chef (Bronagh Gallagher), who almost entirely raised Boy; their short-tempered doctor (Lennie James); and their hardworking butler (Tim McInnerny). But they’ve also made sure that the security that wealth and class once offered them continues to give them a sense of control. When the stranger, Girl (Moses Ingram), finally stumbles into their cave, her fate is in their hands, and she’s given the choice to either return to the cruel and empty world or become part of what they call their “family”—that is, join their ranks as a household helper. In this new world, serfdom is the only way to survive.

Once all this cruelty is established and accepted, Oppenheimer allows the film no illusions of subversion or justice. The endthe stigmas of capitalism and class are a permanent status quo, and the characters are not given much room to disrupt this established order.

Yet what follows is often a sense of personal reckoning, in small but impactful ways. Each character carries the burden of what they had to do to survive and buries those emotions. Girl, however, a wanderer who has been alone for some time, is eager (perhaps a little too eager) to put into words and discuss the worst parts of herself and the actions she most regrets, even if her choices allowed her to survive a little longer.

In doing so, she forces her mother and father to at least recognize that their isolation and their refusal to acknowledge their role in the greater harm—to the world at large and to their own loved ones—has led to a slow, steady disintegration of their souls.

These insights are also expressed in the form of solo numbers, while each character wanders through the corridors alone. There are only a few duets in The end — the family’s insular way of spending their lives has led to the repression not only of feelings but of honest human relationships. But when Girl finally shows up and she and Boy take a liking to each other, the film begins to blossom in subtle ways, from mischievous, playful songs accompanied by bodies in abstract motion to a camera that subtly pans around the room, capturing a greater sense of romance (and pomp and circumstance) through movement and framing.

Oppenheimer and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman work within the reality and physical limitations of each space. Even the most overt, striking emotions can never magically conjure up an ensemble of dancers, which prevents the feeling of fulfillment. The filmmakers, however, perform magic with their use of light and focus. There’s no point in questioning the reality or diegesis of sung dialogue, but since the film lacks the expansive stage space that would allow actors to drop in and out of conversations or move from communicating with each other to remarking to the viewer, the film remixes this theatrical idea with cinematic means: the characters remain clearly visible as long as they can hear and understand each other, but fall out of focus and disappear into the background as soon as one of them steps into the proverbial spotlight and begins expressing inner thoughts and desires that the others cannot (or will not) hear.

The bunker is largely a cold and unforgiving space, completely at odds with the shimmering appearance of the Hollywood musicals of the Golden Age that inspired The ends orchestral sound. However, the characters’ yearning for emotional connection often distorts this color palette in subtle ways, allowing warmer tones and brighter lights to momentarily pop up as the actors move through the room. It’s simultaneously dazzling and despondent, which is entirely appropriate for an Oppenheimer film.

In The act of killingthe director spent several years interviewing a real-life mass murderer who was proud of his crimes. He even had this controversial figure re-enact his brutality through the lens of Hollywood genre (gangster movies and the like), with a handful of colorful, eye-catching detours reminiscent of large-scale musicals. The idea of ​​cinematic self-reflection as a means of repressing and ultimately questioning one’s actions has long been part of Oppenheimer’s work, and in The look of silencehe offers an even riskier look at the narratives used by those in power to whitewash their barbarism.

These ideas trickle down to The end too. The film is intentionally physically constrained, but it ends up being emotionally sprawling, with extended, eerily quiet psychological detours that give each character the space to wrestle with what they’ve done before their acceptance (or rather, rejection) takes the form of a song.

What is ultimately most disturbing about Oppenheimer’s use of musical form is that singing from the heart has long been considered a means of expressing emotional truth from deep within. Here, the characters most responsible for the state of the world refuse to confront what they have done – but they sing anyway, fulfilling the film’s stylistic obligations like automatons, struggling to achieve the honesty that usually underlies the great Hollywood musical. Few films have ever been so grim while sounding so sweet.

The end will be released in American theaters on December 6th.