In The End, director Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) makes his striking fiction debut with a melancholic, apocalyptic musical.
Set two decades after environmental collapse, a family lives in denial within their ornate salt mine bunker. Michael Shannon plays the patriarch, a former industrialist collaborating on a book with his sheltered son (George MacKay), who knows no world beyond their underground refuge. Tilda Swinton shines as the mother, obsessively preserving their priceless art collection, while the arrival of a mysterious outsider (Moses Ingram) shatters their fragile sense of normalcy.
Unlike typical end-of-days stories, The End explores the haunting guilt of those responsible for societal collapse and the ease with which we cling to illusions. Between weighty conversations about their role in the apocalypse, the characters sing haunting melodies, using music as a means to cope with the horrors they refuse to face.
