The End

Joshua Oppenheimer has never been one to take the easy road, and with The End he continues to test both his audience and the boundaries of cinema itself. Known for his groundbreaking documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which forced perpetrators and survivors of genocide to confront their own stories through unsettling acts of performance, Joshua Oppenheimer now turns to fiction—though the distance from reality is much thinner than it first appears. The End is a post-apocalyptic musical set in a bunker, but beneath its eccentric surface lies a film deeply preoccupied with guilt, denial, and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour dirge, sometimes absurd, sometimes profoundly moving, often uneven, but always fascinating.

At its heart is a privileged family who retreated underground when the surface world collapsed in flames—a catastrophe brought about by environmental devastation in which Father, played with weary force by Michael Shannon, was very likely complicit. Mother, embodied with brittle elegance and flashes of mania by Tilda Swinton, distracts herself with her priceless art collection, endlessly rearranging Renoirs and Monets as if order on the walls might mask the chaos beyond them. Their son, played by George MacKay, has known nothing of the outside world, having been born into the bunker, a man-child whose education is filtered entirely through the falsehoods of his parents. Supporting them are a cadre of retainers—Tim McInnerny as the butler, Lennie James as the family doctor, Bronagh Gallagher as a long-time friend—all trapped in their own roles, forced to maintain the façade of civility in this sealed tomb.

The bunker itself is as much a character as the people inside. Joshua Oppenheimer and production designer Jette Lehmann conjure a cavernous, unsettling mansion carved into a salt mine, with its endless blue-gray walls, oppressive lighting, and sterile grandeur. It feels both palatial and suffocating, a monument to wealth and denial that recalls not only survivalist fantasies of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg but also the grotesque spectacle of historical aristocracies dancing on the brink of ruin. Every detail—the swimming pool, the model train set, the rehearsed emergency drills—speaks to lives lived in performance, where survival is less about endurance than about maintaining a self-justifying narrative.

Into this static world stumbles Girl, played with searing authenticity by Moses Ingram. She arrives from the wasteland above, carrying scars of survival and a blunt refusal to paper over the truth. Her intrusion unsettles the bunker’s delicate equilibrium. For the Son, she is a revelation, a living proof of another reality, sparking both awkward romance and a deeper recognition of his parents’ lies. For the parents, however, she is a threat—a reminder of those left outside to burn, and a living indictment of their choices. The dynamics shift uneasily: at first, the family considers killing her, then tolerating her, and finally folding her into their routines. Yet assimilation does not erase the unease, and her very presence forces suppressed guilt to bubble to the surface.

What makes The End truly audacious—and divisive—is its musical form. Working with composer Joshua Schmidt (and occasional contributions from Marius de Vries), Joshua Oppenheimer crafts songs that are intentionally awkward, atonal, and imperfectly sung. Tilda Swinton’s brittle falsetto, Michael Shannon’s gravelly baritone, and George MacKay’s guileless earnestness often sound off-key, but this is precisely the point. These are not songs of catharsis or escape, like in a traditional musical, but songs of delusion—performances the characters mount for themselves as much as for anyone else. The music is the language of denial, the soundtrack of people who cannot face what they’ve done. Occasionally, though, cracks appear: George MacKay’s manic, almost slapstick dance routines, or Michael Shannon scaling a mound of salt while clutching a taxidermy bird, reveal how close these people are to unraveling.

There are moments when the conceit feels strained, even tedious. The film’s length—148 minutes—tests patience, and the repetition of routines can feel suffocating. Yet that very suffocation is part of the experience. Just as the characters are trapped in their bunker, the audience is trapped in the theater, subjected to the endless rituals of denial. Joshua Oppenheimer seems to be asking: isn’t this, too, our condition? Don’t we all live in bubbles of privilege, rearranging the artwork, singing our hopeful songs, pretending the fires outside won’t reach us? The allegory is uncomfortably clear, especially in an era where climate collapse is no longer speculative but present, and where the wealthy insulate themselves from its consequences while the majority suffer.

The performances anchor this daring experiment. Tilda Swinton is both ridiculous and heartbreaking, a woman balancing poise with madness. Michael Shannon brings a mix of menace and pathos to a patriarch desperate to rewrite his sins into virtues. George MacKay, perhaps the most startling, embodies a stunted innocence with unnerving physicality—his wide-eyed guile, his awkward physical comedy, his bursts of childlike wonder mark him as both victim and product of his parents’ lies. And Moses Ingram, whose soulful voice and emotional presence cut through the fog of denial, becomes the ethical center of the film. Her refusal to forget, her insistence on acknowledging pain, makes her both the film’s conscience and its most tragic figure, for even she cannot escape the bunker’s corrosive influence.

Joshua Oppenheimer has said that musicals, for him, embody both childhood wonder and adult disillusionment—he grew up adoring them, only later realizing their sentimentality could serve as a mask for denial. That paradox is embedded in The End. At times it is absurd, even laughable, and at others, it is devastating, a reminder of how easily we lie to ourselves when faced with unbearable truths. Watching these characters sing about bright futures in the bowels of a salt mine, one cannot help but think of our own rituals—our consumption, our politics, our comforts—as the seas rise and forests burn.

The End will not be for everyone. Some will find it indulgent, tedious, even pretentious. Others will see in its strange beauty a reflection of our collective predicament, and in its awkward songs a truth more piercing than any polished aria could deliver. What is undeniable is that Joshua Oppenheimer has crafted a work that resists easy classification: part musical, part satire, part philosophical fable, and all the more powerful for its contradictions. It is a film less about the apocalypse than about the ways we survive it—by burying ourselves in lies, by clinging to illusions, by singing into the dark until the silence finally swallows us.

The End
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
Written by Joshua Oppenheimer, Rasmus Heisterberg
Produced by Joshua Oppenheimer, Tilda Swinton, Signe Byrge Sørensen
Starring  Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James, Michael Shannon
Cinematography : Mikhail Krichman
Edited by Niels Pagh Andersen
Music by Joshua Schmidt, Marius de Vries
Production companies : Neon, The Match Factory/Mubi, Final Cut for Real, The End MFP, Wild Atlantic Pictures, Dorje Film, Moonspun Films, Anagram
Distributed by Mubi (United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Austria), Neon (United States)
Release date : 31 August 2024 (Telluride), December 6, 2024 (United States)
Running time : 149 minutes

Seen on September 11 2025 at the Deauville International Center

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