The End: bunker-bound billionaires make a song and dance of the apocalypse

As unlikely career turns go, The End pretty much beats all. This is the first fiction feature – a musical, at that – by Joshua Oppenheimer, whose controversial co-directed documentary The Act of Killing (2012) used highly interventional, artificial methods in confronting its subjects with their guilt as former members of Indonesian death squads. Following that and the companion piece The Look of Silence (2014), it is hard to see an obvious continuity in The End, although some of the stylised genre sequences in The Act of Killing also used song and dance, in more brazenly kitsch form than we see here.

One thematic connection is the question of responsibility and its acknowledgement or denial. Here, the superwealthy family which has created a post-apocalyptic refuge deep underground in a salt mine has done so at the cost of their memory. Father (the characters have no names, only functions listed in end credits) has engaged his son to ghost-write his memoir, which he does enthusiastically; but what he wants is for the boy to rewrite history. The old mogul’s affable, benevolent self-image (rather than public image, for there no longer is any public) cannot stand the exposure of his role in triggering military-perpetrated slaughter to protect his assets in Indonesia.

This is The End’s most explicit confrontation of the corruption of privilege, but the theme is present throughout. While the career assassins of The Act of Killing admit their crimes but resist feelings of guilt, the family here has repressed the knowledge that their happiness and survival come at others’ cost: for them to thrive, how many have been shut out? As we learn all the deceptions the refuge is built on, even the character who appears innocent in her need of mercy proves to have her own tainted backstory. She is the young outsider who joins the clan and disrupts the equilibrium of a sealed-in micro-community that has become stable, static and desperately stifling.

In this sense, The End, despite its generic futuristic premise, is essentially about the contemporary ills of capitalism and the fact that those who thrive do so at the expense of those who do not; those who, by society’s consensual hallucination, are deemed not to exist.

The End is a bold project, and a quixotic one – a somewhat glacial film for which it is hard to imagine a substantial audience, notwithstanding energetic performances from an eminent cast headed by Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton. Oppenheimer pursues his theme in the film’s highly theatrical staging, creating an enclosed world that is intensely claustrophobic, despite the ample dimensions of the space it inhabits, what with the mine’s cavernous textured chambers. With cinematography by Mikhail Krichman and design by Jette Lehmann, the film has its own unsettling magnificence, from the early shot, with a blast of air rushing through a pipe in the vastness of the mine’s tunnels; immediately after, details from idealised skies and landscapes of the American Sublime school of painting (part of the family’s opulent collection) at once strike an apocalyptic note and offer a fantasy depiction of a natural world that is irredeemably lost, and which in any case never existed as such.

As a musical, or at least a Broadway-inflected modern opera, The End is close to the darker end of Stephen Sondheim. The bleakness of the scenario – characters ploughing with complacent smiles through their own perdition – suggests Beckett with tunes, although the tunes can be reticent. Joshua Schmidt’s orchestral score is sombre, low-key, occasionally embellished with ironic showbiz flourishes.

There is a compelling ensemble piece in here, but it needed more conviction to carve it out: too much of the 148-minute running time is composed of brief dramatic fragments, sometimes seemingly ad hoc, with character relationships too rarely given the chance to develop. The two staff members – Lennie James’s abrasive doctor-cum-security officer, Tim McInnerny’s self-effacing gay majordomo, dubbed ‘Butterball’ – barely emerge, although the latter gets to do some affectingly glum vaudeville hoofing. Most of the singing would only just cut it on stage, although Moses Ingram stands out. Her ‘Girl’ also enjoys a freedom of movement that the other characters are rarely afforded, and plays nicely against George MacKay’s bright-eyed Son, the film’s other embodiment of young possibility – possibility that is surely doomed, although the enigmatic final image invites us to speculate otherwise.