MIFF 2025 | ‘The End’ review: Deeply tedious and mind-bogglingly superficial
Acclaimed documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s surprise pivot to fictional narratives is unforgivably flaccid and ham-handed; a far cry from his past work.
Michael Shannon, George MacKay, Tilda Swinton, and Bronagh Gallagher in “The End.” Photo courtesy of MUBI.
“But when the world needed him most… he vanished.”
The above line speaks of the multi-element-wielding Avatar in Nickelodeon’s animated “The Last Airbender” series, but could also be used to describe the average cinephile’s reaction to the ten years of radio silence that elapsed between acclaimed documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s last film, “The Look of Silence,” and his new film “The End.” As the latter began wending its way through the festival circuit from Telluride onwards, surprise and curiosity abounded, for Oppenheimer’s return to cinema after a decade marked an equally unforeseen departure from documentary filmmaking, and a pivot to… that’s right. Musical theatre.
While his acclaimed 2012 documentary on the Indonesian Communist purges, “The Act of Killing,” does involve a musical theatre sequence, this is the British-American filmmaker’s first attempt at creating a feature-length narrative offering in that most formidable goliath of genres, whose polarising nature undoubtedly had many arthouse cinema fans scratching their heads when “The End” was first announced. Its premise, however, certainly proved far more intriguing — a family named only for their roles, Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton), and Son (George MacKay), have their tranquil post-apocalyptic lives upturned when a mysterious survivor, The Girl (Moses Ingram) darkens the door of their art-festooned underground bunker one fateful day.
The central themes of Oppenheimer’s feature-length documentaries return, albeit mutedly, in “The End.” The twin shadows of shame and survivors’ guilt, or lack thereof, constantly hang over the family and their servants-slash-companions, Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), Butler (Tim McInnerny) and Doctor (Lennie James), the latter of which is notably the only Black member of this strange post-apocalyptic posse until The Girl’s arrival. The one exception to this festering pit of secrets is the Son, whose muscular frame and mostly sunny disposition belies his arrested mental development and ultra-gormless incuriosity; a result of being born and raised in the perfectly neutered shelter that his parents created for him.
Tensions both implicit and explicit begin to rise fairly early into “The End,” but therein lies the film’s first major problem — none of the loose threads that Oppenheimer weaves into his narrative ever quite tie themselves off. After the Girl refuses to return to the shattered surface world, she is forced into what might as well be indentured servitude; dusting Mother’s paintings and cleaning the walls to earn her keep in the bunker. The dubious, racially-charged undertones of this decision are never fully addressed, nor the situation of the similarly bound Doctor, whose interpersonal grievances with the Friend and the Mother also play out briefly onscreen as runtime-padding filler scenes that Oppenheimer clearly had no interest in developing further.
One standout scene comes close to addressing the behemoth issue of such racial disparity — upon examining the model train diorama of the first transcontinental railroad that the Son is making, the Girl objects to his depiction of its mistreated Black and Chinese workers with smiles on their faces, only to find that he was never taught about slavery. It is a heavy moment cinematically, played out with the gravitas it deserves in a stellar turn from both Ingram and MacKay. But, just as we begin to hope that this is the start of the film’s overall thematic tying-off, the topic is simply never brought up again; Oppenheimer continues to bait and switch any resolution of the film’s pressing questions with flaccid musical numbers or mind-bogglingly superficial filler that makes every passing minute of its 150-minute runtime actively painful to sit through.
“The End” would perhaps have been that slight bit more tolerable if its songs were any good, but the film lacks any real gumption in that department too. In the best examples that the genre has to offer, music is always a bridge between realism and feeling; song is employed where environmentally or dialogically-focused filmmaking cannot fully convey the rising emotional tides of a scene or sequence. Conversely, in the worst examples of the genre, a musical film is simply a film where the characters, at times, sing a few little ditties. Unfortunately, “The End” is a shockingly pathetic entry into the latter category; its musical numbers written with no ear for the genre and even less consideration for its cast’s tonal range. Gallagher and Swinton, in particular, sound almost asphyxiated by how ill-matched their thin voices are to the solos they’ve been tasked with performing. One may question if this was all part of the point Oppenheimer was intent on making — some of his most ardent defenders may argue that this was a masterfully ironic turn; the deconstruction of the musical as a long-standing cultural hallmark of artifice and manufactured happiness thematically suited to this bunker-bound family’s plight. Perhaps so. But the message is one that we’ve all heard before, and if it is to be delivered at the cost of torturing one’s eardrums to boot… well, consider me thoroughly disinterested.
Some of the cast do indeed put in a Herculean effort to redeem the otherwise flimsy material they have been given. Thanks to George MacKay’s brilliant emotional range and the transformative physicality of his performance, the Son feels like the only one in Oppenheimer’s miserable little brood who gets anything close to a well-developed character arc. Not to be outdone, Moses Ingram plays her unwitting survivor with a pitch-perfect mix of desperation and revulsion; some of the film’s best moments are scenes in which she and MacKay play off each other, including an unusually heartwarming moment in which the Girl and the Son establish their feelings for each other after a riotous farting session — you read that right — set against the bleak white walls of the limestone mine beyond the bunker. However, the rest of the cast are either strangely off-beat, or weren’t even given a chance to shine — despite her towering reputation, Tilda Swinton’s turn as the family matriarch feels misdirected and lacking in panache, and both Michael Shannon and Bronagh Gallagher never find the opportunity to rise above the cardboard-cutout nature of their woodenly-written characters.
Ultimately, “The End” marks Joshua Oppenheimer’s inclusion in that small but unfortunately growing list of maximalist 21st-century auteurs who believe that making an unjustifiably long yet uniquely formatted film automatically grants them visionary status, most notable among them Brady Corbet, whose emotionally and thematically vacant 2024 outing “The Brutalist” smacks of the same self-congratulatory smugness that “The End” positively oozes with. By the time the film’s underwhelming denouement drags its audience bodily across the finish line, one can’t help but feel an undercurrent of despair. All that grandeur and magnificence; all that time spent stock-still in an uncomfortable cinema seat… for nothing. The only consolation we are left with is that the awful spectacle has, at long last, reached the end.
