The London Film Festival (LFF) is running from October 9 - 20, and I am attending. Immediate impressions will be on X if you’d like to give me a follow there.
The End - dir. Joshua Oppenheimer
Plot in a Nutshell
A post-apocalyptic musical about a wealthy family who transformed a salt mine bunker into a lavish home. They have lived like this for over 25 years. The son (George Mackay) has never known life outside and has never met another human being outside his family. When a young girl (Moses Ingram) the family’s carefully curated facade begins to crack.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) are easy cases to be in the Top 5 or Top 10 greatest documentaries of the century so far. Bold, brilliant storytelling about the madness of humanity. His first full-length fiction film, The End, is also bold in its storytelling and looks at a different kind of human madness, from a different vantage point, but brilliant it is not.
The great ideas (of which there are plenty) fail to translate on screen. I’m sure a conversation about this movie with Oppenheimer would be illuminating, but the film itself just doesn’t sing.
The cast is, predictably, the film’s greatest strength. Michael Shannon’s signing is exactly what you’d expect it to be - not exactly smooth. Still, Shannon and Tilda Swinton give commanding performances, their micro facial expressions contain multitudes. And yet even among those two heavyweights, George Mackay is the MVP. He plays an anxiety-riddled post-apocalypse man-child to near perfection.
Big themes on the nuclear family, obscured individualism, our capacity to reinvent the past as a survival strategy, and everything we keep bottled inside ourselves are all well worth exploring. Sadly, the theatricality, the songs - which are fine enough in terms of melodies and harmonies, but don’t stand out in any memorable way - and the ambiguity in between the lines and the lyrics leave a lot to be desired.