With his new film, Joshua Oppenheimer unusually follows up his two feature documentaries about the Indonesian mass killings of communists and leftists in the 1960s with a post-apocalyptic musical set entirely in the bunker of a single family. Though at first THE END seems like a strange direction for the director, the themes of repression, denial, and delusion soon make a clear connection between this and his documentary work. THE END is a musical where the unsaid (and the unsung) is the important part.
In an old salt mine, a bunker shelters a father (Michael Shannon), a mother (Tilda Swinton), a son (George MacKay), and a few domestic staff. For over twenty years, they have spent their days cleaning, baking, swimming, building a model railway, and swapping out the art on the walls. The father has also enlisted his son’s help writing his memoir to preserve his wisdom and achievements for future generations.
Through the writing of the memoir, it becomes clear that the father was an energy tycoon who was able to build this bunker through the money he made drilling oil in the Global South. Despite the literal end of the world, the father maintains his capitalist extractivist ethos, subscribes to the great man theory of history, and is passing these ideas on to his son. His political outlook is emblematic of the family’s ongoing attempts to continue business as normal – to pretend everything is the same as it was – despite the world being on fire outside.
Then one day, a girl (Moses Ingram) appears in the mine, a refugee from the outside world. Although the family can’t bring themselves to look her in the eyes and kick her out of their safe haven, she comes to live with them at the son’s request. But she soon starts spreading doubt with the son about what he’s been told about the world and what his family did to survive.
“The bunker becomes an all-consuming analogy for the facts they are keeping deeply buried and the emotions they keep hidden away.”
The themes of denial and delusion emerge through the cast’s terrific performances of emotional repression. Swinton plays the mother as incapable of hearing and processing certain ideas, a tendency physically manifested in her obsessive focus on refilling and painting over the cracks that keep appearing in the bunker’s living room. The thoughts they do not express become more important than the banal dialogue of their day-to-day lives. The bunker becomes an all-consuming analogy for the facts they are keeping deeply buried and the emotions they keep hidden away.
Even when the characters burst into song, the musical portions only further emphasise their emotional repression. Each song seems like a lie, hiding what they want to express beneath the tropes of the highly stylised genre in which they find themselves. There’s a deep melancholy between the lines of every song, even the ones ostensibly about ‘family’ and ‘love’ and ‘togetherness’. Are they really, as one song has it, “drowning in love”, or are they just drowning?
Though the songs are largely forgettable, Oppenheimer makes the most of the visuals through the physical bunker set and the salt mines in which he could shoot. The location gave cinematographer Mikhail Krichman a huge amount of control over the blocking and lighting, resulting in some stunning visuals. The salt mine tunnels look incredible, and the way lighting alternates between cool and warm to reflect mood skilfully expresses what the characters won’t say.
A musical about what is unsaid and unexpressed is a bold venture that won’t work for everyone. The focus on denial and delusion may seem dry to some viewers. Hopefully, the surface level of musical numbers and tap dancing proves entertaining enough to encourage people to look closely at what is disguised beneath.