Written by Andreas Babiolakis

Warning: The following review is of a film that is part of TIFF 2024 and may contain spoilers for The End. Reader discretion is advised.

One of my all time favourite documentary films is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing: an experiment where the director (and co-filmmaker Christine Cynn, along an anonymous Indonesian director) traveled to Indonesia to not just interview monsters who partook in the mass killings of 1965 and 1966, but allow them to tell their story through cinema. In fact, these genocidal men were granted the opportunity to use a number of classic film genres and movements, from your typical crime and gangster flick, to a Golden Age Hollywood musical. That second example leads us to Oppenheimer’s first narrative feature film, The End, but before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to circle back to why this experience worked in The Act of Killing: this documentary provided us with angles of hatred and occasional guilt that we’ve never seen in a film before. No one who is evil knows that they are. They believe that they are part of the greater good. This is how monstrosities work in reality, and not the phoned-in drive to be sinful that stories teach us. By the end of The Act of Killing, there’s no turning back, either for the unchanged, terrible murderers of countless lives, or for the one lone person who fights back vomiting because he finally realizes the atrocities of his ways.

After the similar documentary, The Look of Silence (also about the mass murders in Indonesia), Oppenheimer took a break from directing. He has gone on record to discuss how making documentary pictures just isn’t lucrative enough to be able to keep going, so he has now tried his hand at fictional storytelling (well, The End still stems from many issues that we are going through today). This film is a musical meant to dictate what our future will look like if we don’t turn things around, as we watch the unnamed family (left anonymous for us to place our own figureheads and elite families in the position of these characters) live in an underground bunker they built. The rest of the world’s population (for the most part) has been wiped out by climate change and fires spread by gasoline. It’s no coincidence that the patriarch of this subterranean family (Michael Shannon) was once an oil tycoon.

Despite being hugely responsible for the deaths of pretty much everyone else on Earth, this family tries to live in luxury. Of the people they saved to have with them underground, they included a doctor (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInnerny), and a chef who is insisted to be a family friend and yet is treated as the help (Bronagh Gallagher). The tycoon’s wife (Tilda Swinton) and stunted, man-child son (George McKay) live there as well, and all other relatives are long dead. The son has lived almost entirely underground, and it shows with his bizarre behaviour and clueless knowledge of life. This isn’t really the poor kid’s fault, seeing as every family member is keen on lying to each other and to themselves; the endless gaslighting for decades has resulted in a plethora of untruths (but who is anyone kidding, when basically everyone else on the planet is dead). Suddenly, for the first time in what feels like an eternity, a strangle has stumbled upon the bunker (Moses Ingram). The family is initially suspicious of her and her intentions, and they act with trepidation. She falls in love with the son of the family (and vice versa), which complicates the family dynamic.

At the heart of this film is a far stronger depiction of cyclical negligence and the persistence to not own up to one’s own mistakes and sins, but we sadly do not get that in The End. There is much promise at first, with a shot of the son’s toy train set up which leads us to the first song of the film. The tune is great and the purpose makes sense (everyone speaks with choppy, mutated dialogue to show that this family has devolved, but they sing coherently to express their inner feelings and thoughts). The desire for a healed planet is present in the display, even if the son’s misapprehensions of history (thanks to his lying parents) stymie the art a little bit. The film progresses, and we are given explanations as to how the family has survived underground for so many years (not every piece of information is ever given to us, allowing us to fill in the blanks where needed). Around an hour in, the story even appears to really get going once the stranger becomes properly assimilated within the family and everyone is beginning to be forced to reconcile with the past (of humanity, and of themselves).

It’s around the two hour mark when I begin to realize that The End is starting to turn in on itself. It keeps regurgitating the same ideas throughout. None of the characters really change, save for the son and the stranger. That’s fine if The End drove itself to a more prevalent point than it does. Instead, it settles for an obvious truth that we learned very early into the film: stubbornness will kill us, and the most stubborn people will never stop making mistakes (thus making them more than likely responsible for the rest of our fates). Within the final half hour, the film truly falls apart narratively, with conflicts that simply happen and don’t change any outcomes, and a final sequence that has something to say (this family will remain alive through perseverance, but they will never atone for their sins, so are they truly living) but lands with a bit of a thud (despite a gorgeous, allegorical image: a hint that the end is the beginning is the end is the beginning).

Ironically, the end is what kills The End, because it confirms that the dilly-dallying before was kind of for nothing. This didn’t need to be a two-and-a-half hour film if if was going to keep the same message throughout; this could have easily been a short film. It’s devastating to accept this, because The End boasts so much potential. The song numbers are mostly stellar, including a musical monologue by Swinton that expresses the conversations with the character’s dead mother that she wishes she could have had, or Shannon’s tycoon character almost finally acknowledging that this is all his fault (before “surviving” and going back to his old ways). The use of the bunker as a sound stage is clever, and the bareness of this post-apocalyptic set up feels very Bob Fosse (stripped down and vulnerable). Even the awkward dancing and singing comes from the deluded elite who believe that they are magnificent at anything they do (so you never pick apart how they dance because this makes sense in this world). Every actor does a strong job with their characters, and to try and single out who performed the best would be missing the point with how stacked this talent is.

While I love sequences and ideas, The End isn’t as good as its individual parts because the bigger picture is squandered. There are even fundamental editing errors, where flow is interrupted by final lines in a scene that go nowhere, or transitions and cuts fumble the baton from the previous sequence to the next. I at first thought this was intentional to mimic the clumsiness of the characters, but it was clear by the third act that there maybe wasn’t a cohesive story that could easily be assembled and that this is the best that could be done with the available footage. No matter how good certain moments are (and quite a few are great, in my opinion), The End doesn’t do a good job to prepare you for the next one often enough that it’s distracting. I love how this film looks, sounds, and feels for the most part. I cannot get myself to ignore the glaring mistakes, from Oppenheimer losing sight of what he is trying to say (and ultimately resorting to the same idea for way too long) to the patchiness of the final project (this is a musical: likely the least acceptable genre to have editing mistakes within given the necessity of timing, choreography, and other technical elements).

What Oppenheimer may have missed with The Act of Killing is that we are being told new information through the musical numbers directed by terrible people. The End tries to add some humanity to these characters, which is well intentioned, but there is no point in trying this if these people never fully open up to us, nor if there isn’t a build up towards something more substantial than “see, I told you bad people cannot change”. I’m gutted because there was so much to look forward to here, from the great idea and strong cast to the promotional teasers that hinted at something far more detailed than what we get (the film even encourages us to embrace subtlety, because it forces you to look deeper); there’s not much depth in a film by a director who has managed to tell histories of truth from the confessions of some of the most dishonest, inhuman people to ever exist (mass murderers). In The End, Oppenheimer and his characters sadly don’t have a hell of a lot to say, as if their fate was determined before the story even began (which, I suppose, adds validity to the film’s title). The End isn’t terrible given what does work, but it sadly is not nearly as good (or even good at all) considering what was possible with this project.

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.