;)
Ambitious mess will always be more exciting and artistically valuable than cautious mediocrity. The timid filmmaker has their place, but they'll never rise above those whose ideas reach for the sky, the heavens, the likely impossible. Or, in Joshua Oppenheimer's case, those who burrow down below, digging to the center of the Earth, mayhap to hell. For his feature debut, The End, the director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence goes underground, setting the scene in a not-so-distant future when the Earth has been left ravaged by climate change and other related catastrophes, virtually inhabitable, so hostile to life that those who survive must fight one another for the scant resources around…
Not that the audience gets to see that state of affairs. Such things happen on the surface, but The End is a story of the underground, staged in an Eden built where Hades ought to be. There, in the excavated recesses of a salt mine, live Father, Mother, and Son, nameless characters defined by their familial bond and extravagant wealth. Their days are mainly occupied with maintaining their eternal routines, switching the décor of their halls with paper flowers and some of the world's most famous paintings. Often, they'll all have safety training through some savage role-playing. Well, Father and Son also have their own project on the side, with the older man instructing his progeny to write the industrialist's memoir, all white-washed and hagiographic.
The pollution and terrible human rights violations, the massacres and crackdowns weren't his fault. Not at all. Son knows no better, having been born within the underground sanctum, only knowing the world above and before through his parents. Well, there are also a couple of other folks down there with them, since one shouldn't expect such rich persons to be self-reliant. There's Butler, Doctor, and someone simply known as Mother's Friend, whose contribution to the household centers on her cooking. This latter one is closest to Son, caring for the perpetually childish twenty-year-old as a replacement for the boy she lost long before this present future.
Also, they sing, for, additionally to its aspirations of apocalyptic satire, The End is a musical styled to Golden Age precepts. The compositions are lush, roaring from a full ghost orchestra, regularly more potent than the vocals provided by the cast. Leitmotifs abound, re-mixed and re-contextualized across the story's nearly two-and-a-half-hour length. Mother's remembrances, these silly symphonies of self-delusion, are oft transmuted by later scenes, a talk of strangers going from wistful to desperate to viperous phantasmagoria. Her mirror soliloquy is probably the high point of the picture's musical canon, though others might prefer Father's solipsistic climb or Son's love songs and salty frolics.
Of course, those latter amorous tunes only exist because another element enters their forbidden paradise. She's the nameless Girl, sole survivor of her family and weighted down by the trauma such loss implies. At first, the underground family wants to slaughter the intruder, but compassion prevails much to Mother's chagrin. And so, the unit expands, growing pains and all. It further fractures, for Girl's presence puts in doubt all that Son has held as absolute truth. In some ways, the rules of his universe, the very definitions of right and wrong, collapse. The older residents are affected in their own way, forced to reckon with an outsider's view of their past actions, the choices they made to survive and thrive while the rest of the world burned.
Various critics and more casual moviegoers have decried The End as a catastrophic departure on Oppenheimer's part – a man literally sang to me, in the middle of the Toronto street, about how shit the movie was and how it had nothing on the director's docs. However, that feels like a misread, whether of The End or its non-fiction brethren. All these films are siblings, united by Oppenheimer's interest in the workings of a mind who perpetrates evil yet must find a way to live with itself. Much of the musical is about self-deceit, the lies told internally to paint one as a hero rather than villain. In many ways, Oppenheimer's new morose madness feels like an epic expansion of those Act of Killing sketches, including all the kitsch and atonal genre-mashing that they wrought. And like there, the genre mismatch that bristles against the viewer feels less like an elegant cinematic gesture than an attempt by the subjects to evade the truth of their culpability.
Certainly, the low-budget real-killer imaginings of yore are technically distant from The End's spectacle with a big-name cast and even bigger-named producers – Sam Mendes and Werner Herzog, for example. By exploding the polish and opulence of his device, Oppenheimer has lost an essential bite, somewhat defanging the experiment. Then again, it's difficult to ascertain just how deep the director wants his teeth to go into his subjects' bloody mass. For a film whose premise sounds right out of an Ruben Östlund or Adam McKay satire, The End rejects what such auteurs would have injected into its system. Instead of snide cruelties, Oppenheimer makes his musical into an incredibly generous piece of work, extending grace to those who least deserve it. Then again, is anyone completely undeserving of grace? Of humanity?
His is a barbed embrace, yet the warmth of the gesture is sincere. The earnestness allows for notes of hope to ring through The End's concerto, floating upward when a minor key growl would be the assumed sound. This also manifests in the fluid lighting by Mikhail Krichman, fond of variations within the same take, casting both a golden glow and mortuary cold in the cast's faces. Such tonal quandaries provide the actors leeway to explore their archetypes' un-archetypical humanity. The results vary from thespian to thespian, with Michael Shannon delivering the flattest work as the all-powerful patriarch, while Tilda Swinton and Moses Ingram find plenty of fascinating fodder within the mysteries of Mother and Girl.
They can never quite sustain the repetitive cycles of the story, so often found spinning its wheels, but give the viewer enough reason to keep alert and tuned in, eager to discover what else lies within their nameless creations, what other delusions they've maintained, what horrors they've let grow within the cracked ruin of their souls. Staring into the void of The End, a sense of unlikely unity prevails. If not between factions of a dying mankind, then between the spectator and the spectral spectaculars on-screen. Together, we shall confront the worst of us and sing its glory, its pity, its horror and awe.
The End will be released in theaters by NEON this December. At TIFF, it played in the Special Presentations, with director and stars in attendance to guide their captive audience down a road of no