“The End” assessment: The household within the bunker continues to sing in denial

“The End,” from director Joshua Oppenheimer (“The Act of Killing,” “The Look of Silence”), is a darkish musical about maybe the one six folks left on Earth: an oilman and his trophy spouse (Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton), their grownup son born within the bunker (George MacKay) and the three helpers (Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James) invited into this underground ark.

There is one thing horrible exterior. We hear allusions to a blood-red solar, a poisoned sea, and buzzards. But this salt mine sanctuary boasts partitions lined with artwork and a desk set for wine AND Champagne. These survivors hid their struggling for greater than 20 years. Yet they cannot breathe.

Not within the literal sense. The solid has the lung capability for greater than two hours of singing and the songs, for which Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics and composer Joshua Schmidt composed, are completely beautiful, filled with humble allure. If a voice cracks, it cracks. Emotion takes heart stage, supported by unshakable violins and horns and sneaky melodies that rise an octave to succeed in shocking notes.

But there is not sufficient air right here for everybody to have a persona. The characters are all strictly mannered, as if imitating mannequins from previous bomb shelter movies from the Nineteen Fifties. In the opening tune, folks enter the lounge one after one other, casually clutching espresso cups, and once they understand the others are already buzzing about one other excellent new morning, they take part as if to be well mannered. “We struggle collectively within the darkness / our future is vivid,” they harmonize, conserving their backs straight like a church choir.

The irony is obvious and for the primary hour that is all. The self-confident tycoon, the superficial spouse, the adored youngster who grew up so cloistered that he whistled canary songs to a crayfish tank and tried to show pet tips to a fish. These aren’t full characters – they do not even deserve names – they’re simply the clichés we might anticipate to see eating on Dover sole whereas the remainder of us are useless. (The staff additionally do not deserve a lot consideration.) Oppenheimer and his co-writer Rasmus Heisterberg have given every member of the family a flaw that they sing about so incessantly that the movie’s operating time could possibly be lower by a 3rd. We get it, life within the bunker is airless. This home is so grey and chilly that one thing has to click on.

During the movie’s stark, boring first half, the household discovers a younger stranger, performed by Moses Ingram, who has endured the apocalypse lengthy sufficient to trace down the supply of the exhaust smoke. If you assume that is implausible, wait till you see how this supposedly messy refugee — a lady who’s by no means worn sneakers earlier than — not solely comes up with TikTok-trained concepts about working-class rights, however appears unfazed by these opulent digs.

Ingram and MacKay begin out because the type of couple you would not put collectively despite the fact that they may truly be the final fertile singletons alive. But they heat up sufficient to one another to sing their duet, operating throughout the salt mine with arms outstretched. (Choreographers Sam Pinkleton and Ani Taj cannily select free motion over precision.) Eventually, the movie takes flight and turns into one thing lovely.

Oppenheimer is searching for one thing that goes straight to the center of what a musical is. Harmonizing means agreeing. It is a public demonstration of solidarity, a pact to parrot the identical illusions. Here, it is solely when these characters separate themselves that they sing their fact. Even then, they’ve been so suffocated by lies that they cannot all the time discover the proper phrases. In one quantity, Swinton, starry-eyed to point out the cracks in her high-fashion veneer, poses in a sheer raincoat whereas bleating uncooked, screaming noises that mix with determined strings. As for the naïve son, who MacKay performs with precocious precociousness and mind worm, throughout his wildest solo, he thrusts his crotch and says, “Nyah, nyah!”

Lies are to Oppenheimer what skeletons are to Da Vinci. His objective is to know how they work, how they evolve and fold, how they find yourself controlling the best way an individual strikes via life. When the Shannon patriarch insists that “oil drilling was simply an excuse for wind farms, clear water, to avoid wasting chimpanzees,” he’s rewriting historical past for an viewers fashioned solely by himself and the way he needs his son to see it. The extent of the destruction it has induced is obscure and unspeakable. We know there have been riots as a result of he insists there weren’t.

Given that our setting is the tip of the world and all, we will estimate that its loss of life toll surpasses that of Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing,” through which former troopers of a loss of life squad Indonesian reenacted their previous massacres to strengthen their perception that they have been the heroes. That highly effective movie sided with our need to punish attackers. But when Shannon’s fossil gasoline tycoon counters that the remainder of humanity drives vehicles too, nicely, he is proper.

Perhaps out of a shared sense of guilt, Oppenheimer needs to provide these sinners an opportunity to atone for his or her errors. Alone, they say sorry, as when Shannon climbs a pile of salt clutching a taxidermy chicken as if imagining herself the heroine of “The Sound of Music.” Rather than doom its characters ceaselessly, “The End” gives these plastic folks the selection to reclaim their humanity. This is it what seems to be torture.

This is a musical that treasures foolish imperfections, a scene the place McInnerny does a humorous little faucet dance, or the enjoyment within the giggle of Shannon’s hyena. Oppenheimer frees his screenplay from the duty of explaining how this apocalyptic manor works. The meals provide, the waste disposal, none of that comes into play, and the characters are fully detached to what occurs exterior their cave. Instead, all the eye is paid to the micro-changes in folks’s moods, which, for such fastidiously crafted characters, are as dramatic as a brand new ripple in a rock backyard.

Only the invader of Ingram’s home might be pleased and unhappy on the identical time. The woman is unable to cover her feelings and this causes the bunker to shake to its foundations. The movie that surrounds her is itself constructed on a line of contradictions: it’s without delay tepid and insistent as a sledgehammer, a slice of decadent milquetoast. But allow us to take into consideration the query that the characters by no means ask or sing: what’s the distinction between being alive and dwelling?