The End (Drama)

Rating:

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Producer: Signe Byrge Sørensen,Tilda Swinton,Joshua Oppenheimer
Screenwriter: Rasmus Heisterberg,Joshua Oppenheimer
Cinematographer: Mikhail Krichman
Composer: Joshua Schmidt
Editor: Niels Pagh Andersen
Production Designer: Jette Lehmann
Costume Designer: Frauke Firl
Key Cast: Tilda Swinton,George MacKay,Michael Shannon,Moses Ingram,Bronagh Gallagher,Danielle Ryan,Lennie James,Tim McInnerny

Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon sing and dance their way through the end of the world in acclaimed filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic musical.

A quarter of a century after a cataclysmic environmental event, a former petroleum CEO and his family – along with a few lucky friends and domestic employees – live a life of luxury in a majestic doomsday bunker housed inside an abandoned salt mine, replete with swimming pool, art collection, library, model train set and elegant dinner parties. But when a girl from ‘the surface’ is found collapsed in the mine, she threatens to disrupt their domestic bliss and burst their bubble of privilege. Are there others alive on the surface? Should they let them in? In times like these, there’s nothing to do but sing.

Delivering plenty of real-world resonance in concert with its absurdist musical numbers, The End marks documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s transition to narrative filmmaking following his twin chronicles of the fallout from Indonesia’s anti-communist genocide, The Act of Killing (MIFF 2013) and The Look of Silence (MIFF 2015). The resulting satirical portrait of elites inuring themselves to climate catastrophe is an audacious achievement that needs to be seen to be believed. After all, if you’ve never watched Michael Shannon carol a classic Broadway ballad atop a towering pile of subterranean rubble, have you really lived?

“[Oppenheimer’s] acute understanding of the lies we tell ourselves and each other to preserve whatever monstrosity we created … makes The End one of the most important films of the year.” – Exclaim!