Joshua Oppenheimer made his name with some of the most unsettling and acclaimed documentaries of the 21st century. We saw The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which redefined political cinema, and helped expose buried atrocities, triggered government responses, and for this, he received two Oscar nominations. Now, in a left turn, he’s made The End. Set in a luxury bunker decades after civilisation’s collapse, the film follows a family clinging to delusion. Here, Swinton and Shannon play “Mother” and “Father,” joined by George MacKay as their son and Moses Ingram as an outsider who cracks their reality. This isn’t your typical dystopia, it comes complete with plush interiors, immaculate lighting, and musical numbers straight out of MGM’s golden age. It’s absurd, and that’s the point-the family aren’t surviving, they’re performing. The songs, composed with Josh Schmidt, draw from ‘50s Hollywood musicals, they’re melodic, sentimental, and completely artificial. The characters sing of blue skies and brighter tomorrows, while the world outside is long dead.
Swinton is low-key devastating while Shannon radiates suppressed guilt, and MacKay has the inherited doubt. Ingram’s outsider grounds the film, he’s capable of remorse and of truth without performance. And the viewer isn’t asked to judge these people, but ask if we can see glimpses of ourselves in them. Interestingly, the film isn’t set up to be a satire, The End hits hardest because it trades irony for sincerity, focusing not on apocalypse but on the emotional wreckage we create by lying to ourselves–it shines a light on how we cope with guilt, regret, and the lies we tell ourselves to stay afloat.
The bunker, built inside a salt mine in Sicily, is less a shelter than a tomb. Production designer Jette Lehmann gives it a dreamy sheen, filled with soft light and painted murals. It’s beautiful, and that’s part of the horror and its completely unsettling nature. Oppenheimer, ever the provocateur, wants us to cry three times. Once for the beauty. Once for the shared feeling. And lastly, for the cost of it all: the illusions, the cowardice, and the refusal to change.
