It is only six months since Joshua Oppenheimer’s singular musical premiered at Telluride Film Festival to politely puzzled reviews, but it already feels time for reappraisal and rehabilitation. In some ways the director’s first dramatic feature is just what you’d expect from the man behind The Act of Killing. That documentary on Indonesian genocides was as formally upending as it was morally shocking. An experimental satire about climate catastrophe sounds like the sort of thing he might attempt. Right?
“Yeah, but not like this,” too many critics responded. To be fair, taking place over two hours and 30 minutes in the same isolated bunker, the film could not be classed a laugh riot. We don’t even get to see the end of the world. That has more or less played itself out – seemingly as linked environmental and political catastrophe – before we meet the inhabitants of a luxury bunker many metres beneath the earth.
As if to emphasise that the film is not letting us off easy, none of the characters – suggesting some austere Brecht-leaning political play from the 1970s – is allowed a name, only a classification. So Michael Shannon is the quietly assertive Father. Tilda Swinton is the supremely aloof Mother. George MacKay, largely a stranger to the world before apocalypse, is the naive, accepting Son. The Irish actor Bronagh Gallagher, whose character’s own son died years earlier, is the sad, supportive Friend. The indestructible Tim McInnerny, doing great work in his 60s, is delicate on his feet as Butler (again, a job, not a name).
Oppenheimer has done his research into paranoid despots and, learning from their fantasies, has constructed a plausible hideaway from Armageddon. A fish farm provides fertiliser for the plants. Safety drills are regular. A collection of fine art leans towards the school of heroic exteriors favoured by Caspar David Friedrich. One imagines that Father – who, not coincidentally, made his money through oil – sees himself as the mountain-topping subject of that German painter’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Alone (or nearly so) with the sublime.
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The reality, of course, is different. The family and its band of retainers are living a cowardly half-life in the well-appointed armpit of a dead planet. Son is writing an absurd hagiographic biography of his dad for nobody. Seasons pass with rituals that accidentally celebrate ossification. Some of this becomes clearer to the residents when, after furrowed dispute, they admit a wandering refugee, played by Moses Ingram, that the credits list only as Girl.
What we are watching here is a grim operetta on the subject of denial. Musicals often invite the characters to break into song when their spoken words fail to express hidden truths. Here, at least when in company, the cast, intoning Oppenheimer’s lyrics over Joshua Schmidt’s sinuous melodies, are able to maintain their self-delusions as the orchestra surges. The film could have been titled Everything Is Fine, that lie reflecting not just the characters’ inner dishonesty but also that of the watching public. The family stands in for those now living in relative comfort while most of the world’s population suffers and the seas around them rise.
Largely filmed at Ardmore Studios, in Co Wicklow, the film makes its case powerfully, beautifully and with enormous good taste. Unfortunately, it also does so without much forward movement for the first hour or so. They are trapped in the bunker. We are trapped in the cinema. Allow The End some leeway, however, and its persuasive, unsettling intelligence will get under your fingernails and into your bones. If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.
In cinemas from Friday, March 28th
