‘The End’ Is About Mankind Facing Certain Doom. Its Director Hopes It Inspires You
Joshua Oppenheimer wasn’t planning on making his narrative feature debut about the end of the world — and he certainly didn’t think it would be a musical. And yet, eight years after the idea popped into his head, at last his bold opus has come to the big screen, ready to jolt audiences out of their complacency.
The End (in theaters now) is like no other movie this year. Yes, there are several that feature singing and dancing, but none of those take place in a lavish underground bunker occupied by a wealthy family 25 years after Earth’s environment has become uninhabitable. Starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon as Mother and Father, and George MacKay as the sweet and naive Son, the film finds its privileged characters waiting out the apocalypse in comfort. Occasionally, they’ll belt out songs that conjure the iridescent glow of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the tunes’ sparkling melodies crashing up against the seeming direness of the circumstances.
“The film is more urgent now,” Oppenheimer says over Zoom from the Catskills mere weeks after Donald Trump’s reelection. “We still have time to look honestly at the many ways in which we bury our heads in the sand.”
Movingly earnest but deeply critical of our ability to delude ourselves, The End has divided viewers since its Telluride Film Festival premiere. But its maker insists the movie’s politically pointed portrait of our species’ self-destruction is, ultimately, hopeful. “It’s too late for the family in the film,” Oppenheimer says, “but it’s not too late for the audience.”
Recently turned 50, the Oscar-nominated American documentarian is best known for 2012’s The Act of Killing and 2014’s The Look of Silence, which examined the lingering impact of Indonesia’s genocide of the mid-1960s, interviewing perpetuators who remain defiant about their bloody acts. Oppenheimer had considered a third chapter, focusing on oligarchs who built their empires on the back of those atrocities. But after the death threats he received for his documentaries made it too dangerous to return to Indonesia, he sought out oligarchs elsewhere.
Editor’s picks
“There was one oil tycoon in Asia who had obtained his concessions through intimidation and the crushing of resistance in the areas around his oil fields,” says Oppenheimer, who met the man and his family. Then they mentioned they were in the market for a doomsday bunker, and Oppenheimer asked to accompany them to look at one.
Soft-spoken but impassioned, Oppenheimer smiles as he recalls this unusual shopping trip. “It was very much like the one in The End in terms of its facilities: underground pool, gardens, a vault for their large art collection, a huge garage for his luxury car collection, a wine cellar. I was dying to ask, ‘How would you cope with your guilt for the catastrophe from which you would be fleeing?’ They planned on raising a new generation in this bunker — I thought, ‘How would you tell your story to them? How might that be a process that largely served to ease your own regrets?’”
It was on the flight home to Copenhagen, where he lives with his husband, when he imagined being a fly on the wall, decades later, discovering how the family’s grand experiment had worked out. Oppenheimer was watching a favorite film on his laptop, the dazzling 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, when inspiration hit: He needed to tell this story through song.
Some critics have been thrown by The End’s sincere construction. Oppenheimer, who co-wrote the screenplay and also provided lyrics, films the elegant musical numbers without winking at the audience. Indeed, the songs, composed by Joshua Schmidt, sport sturdy, indelible melodies, but the sting comes from the words the family sings about love and community.
“The cliché about musicals is, what gets people singing are these moments where the characters’ truth is just too big for speech and they burst into song,” Oppenheimer says. “What inspired The End to be a musical was the understanding that this is a film about false hope, about the idea that tomorrow will somehow be better than today and that things will work out just fine. [It’s] a film about delusion. Far from the songs embodying the deepest truths of the character, they would be these luminously, beautiful, seductive, swooning lies.”
As a result, this earnest film presents the family as both farce and tragedy. Shannon’s Father, a powerful oil executive, tasks Son with writing a favorable biography that portrays him as a trailblazing leader, not a despoiler of the planet. Swinton’s Mother, a former dancer at the Bolshoi — at least, according to her — busies herself changing the bunker’s artwork, deciding between myriad classic paintings that have somehow found their way into her home. But Oppenheimer doesn’t want us sneering at the family’s self-absorption — instead, he wants us to identify with their moral blindness, a strategy that carries over from his documentaries about Indonesia.
“As Primo Levi said, ‘There may be monsters among us, but they’re too few to worry about — what we have to concern ourselves with are the ordinary people like ourselves,’” explains Oppenheimer, quoting the Holocaust survivor and author who penned If This Is a Man, an account of his time at Auschwitz. “It’s tempting to say, ‘Everyone who participated in the genocide in Indonesia were monsters,’ but it’s much more probable that they’re just people. While I would hope that, if I grew up in any one of their families, I would make different choices, I’m very blessed never to have to find out. Likewise, with The End, when I felt that in the service of the film’s political message — how we take care of the climate, and about inequality and greed — the characters were being presented as monsters, I realized we had to recut a sequence or rewrite a scene. It was a delicate balance.”
That insistence on an audience seeing themselves in his subjects — whether Indonesian murderers or a family complicit in global destruction — is what makes Oppenheimer’s films so fascinating and complicated. The End’s performances are full of gentle warmth — Shannon has perhaps never been lovelier onscreen than as this supportive dad — and the songs are so lilting that you may not notice the self-deception at their core. Oppenheimer asks us to remember our shared ability to forget inconvenient truths — how we’re all aware of global warming but do little to counteract the growing threat.
He also knows, with Trump’s return to the White House a little more than a month away, The End’s vision of unavoidable catastrophe could be understandably dispiriting. But rather than retreat into despair — or escape into musical fantasies — he’s taking solace in an encounter that happened right after the election.
“I was with my husband, visiting his family in Japan,” Oppenheimer recalls. “We were both so upset [about the election] that we needed to connect with something permanent. We went to the world’s oldest wooden building, which is a temple in Nara. The wood in this temple has been radiocarbon-dated to the sixth century. Walking into that temple, I immediately began to sob, because I realized that this is not permanent — it’s fragile.”
And yet, when he emerged out of the darkness of the temple into the brilliant midday sun, he was overwhelmed by what he describes as “a sense of peace.” Unlike the false hope of The End’s One Percenters, though, Oppenheimer was imbued with a sense of purpose — the same feeling he wants viewers to take from his film.
“I knew that, no matter how frightening I find this moment, that it’s not that we should suppress fear, but recognize it and set it aside for a minute,” Oppenheimer says. “I was able to connect to another emotion, which was just a calm certainty that I will resist — up to and including nonviolent civil disobedience. I don’t say I look forward to getting arrested or whatever the consequences are of civil disobedience, but I thought, ‘It’s a rediscovery.’ That rediscovery of a deeper humanity, which comes from collective solidarity [and] collective action, awaits anyone who will look honestly at our situation. I’m quite convinced that that’s more than just a silver lining.”