I genuinely feared The End would never end

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a ‘post-apocalyptic musical’ starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon that is being sold as a ‘bold vision’. And as you know I’m all for bold visions – except perhaps ones that go on for two and a half hours (I genuinely feared The End would never end) and give the impression throughout of being like a premise in search of a story. The musical, however, does definitively answer one question: can Swinton and Shannon carry a tune? Spoiler: not really.

This is the first dramatic feature from Oppenheimer who is best known as the documentarian behind two stunning films about the 1960s Indonesian genocide (The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence). The End was inspired by Oppenheimer’s visit to a Russian oligarch’s immense survivalist bunker that set him wondering what life would look like if the Russian and his family were forced to retreat to it.

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It’s set in just such a bunker two decades after some environmental catastrophe has made Earth virtually uninhabitable. The family have not been given names. They are ‘Mother’ (Swinton), ‘Father’ (Shannon) and ‘Son’ (George MacKay) and I am as wary of films that do this – remember Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!? – as I am of novels that say they are ‘experimental’, which generally means there is no plot to speak of. (What can I say? I like something to go somewhere.)

Mother, Father and Son live with ‘Friend’ (Bronagh Gallagher), ‘Butler’ (Tim McInnerny) and ‘Doctor’ (Lennie James, so wasted it’s upsetting) in luxurious circumstances. Their bunker, set within a vast salt mine, has a swimming pool and is exquisitely decorated, plus they are so wealthy they have Rembrandts and Renoirs.