Fittingly drawing a close to Marie’s coverage from Manchester Film Festival 2025, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End sees a family of apocalypse survivors challenged by the appearance of a young woman to confront the truth about the stories they have been telling themselves.
One of the great things about booking films way in advance at film festivals then forgetting about them, is that you never know what you’re walking into. Will it be a real treat? Or a bit of a dud? With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, I can honestly say I’m still not at all sure.
Firstly, I had forgotten that this is a musical. Nobody was more surprised than I was when George MacKay, Michael Shannon, and Tilda Swinton burst into song, particularly given that The End takes place in a lavish underground bunker, in which a family and a few chosen friends live following an apocalyptic event on the surface.
The characters are broadly painted, to the extent that they do not even have specific names – they are listed as Mother (Swinton), Father (Shannon), and Son (MacKay). With them are Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), Butler (Tim McInnerny), and Doctor (Lennie James), and this has been the household for the past 25 years, since whatever took place above (we never learn exactly what occurred). Then Girl (Moses Ingram) unexpectedly arrives in their haven, the first outsider in years, and upsets the balance of their carefully-ordered lives.
Son, in particular, who was born in the bunker and has never seen the outside world, has a world-view shaped by the stories he has been told, stories which everyone is using to protect themselves from having to face the consequences of their past actions.
It’s fair to assume that people will associate Joshua Oppenheimer with documentary filmmaking centred around the executions carried out by the Indonesian military dictatorship in the 1960s (The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence). On first glance, The End is as far removed as one could imagine from these two, but actually it has things in common. Except this time Oppenheimer isn’t giving military executioners in a distant land the opportunity to take responsibility for their past actions, but he’s asking us, the audience, to realise that we need to take responsibility for what we are doing now to our own planet, and not to wrap ourselves in stories about how we “did our best” and “had no choice”. This explains the abundance of mirrors everywhere, with multiple reflections of the characters looking directly out into the audience.
There were a few walkouts in the screening I attended, and giggling during some of the musical numbers, which reinforced the feeling I have that the musical element hasn’t quite worked as it was intended; perhaps it is too oblique even for a film festival audience. But Swinton and Shannon are always worth watching.