Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End may be anti-musical and anti-world but at least it’s pro-planet

P. Stuart Robinson (b. 1958), is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Tromsø. He writes academically about the politics of film, and has published in such scholarly journals as Alphaville, Apparatus and Nordlit.

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TIFF 2025: Joshua Oppenheimer takes the musical genre (together with our whole messed-up world) and turns it on its head. The End, which recently received its Nordic premiere at the Tromsø International Film Festival, buries us, like it or not, in the proverbial concrete bunker of the apocalypse to face, as it were, the music. Are we up to the task? God help us if we’re not! It’s the only chance we’ve got – if it isn’t already too late…

The premise is deceptively simple. CEO world-destroyer and family, together with their loyal staff, are now hiding, literally and figuratively, from their own handiwork. They have retreated to their exclusive shelter, deep in the bowels of an abandoned salt mine, where they have been joined by an additional companion, that symbol of the stunted, blighted future, their now grownup son. Soon they will add another to their ranks, a feared interloper and survivor from outside.

She, in contrast to all predecessors, somehow evades summary execution. Now they must all cope with their fearful destiny and their shameful, albeit suppressed, complicity. It’s a marvellous foundation, believe it or not, for a little Hollywood-style musical theatre.

What makes the film as powerful as it is disconcerting is the constant jarring of mode and tone. What makes it truly remarkable is the way this central filmic tension seems to speak to that of modern society per se, at a time where we are – or should be – beginning to understand our own fatal flaws. The songs resolutely romanticise their – and our – eviscerated, compromised existence, desperately seeking meaning in the emptiness. Then the music stops, and the bunker comes into sickeningly sharp focus.

It’s when the music stops that the excuses, the rationalisations and obfuscations, rise like scum to the surface. These are lent extra pathos by their context. The son, heir to all the hoarded ‘treasure,’ like the masterpieces made tawdry by crowding the walls of their bunker, is now writing the equally worthless memoir of their sordid family history, for no-one and to no apparent purpose. Out come the routine platitudes and excuses nonetheless: I genuinely helped people, or I was actually quite irrelevant: If I hadn’t poured CO2 into the atmosphere to enrich myself, someone else would have done it anyway.

Even the simplest of things are falsified. The father can’t remember what he felt, if anything, when he met the mother. The son embellishes the story by transposing how he himself felt in his encounter and enchantment with the female interloper (warily admitted to the fold), how he felt unsure of himself, found it hard to speak. The father then repeats this back to the mother as a token of his affection and his own – oh so human – vulnerability. All is corrupted; nothing is genuine. Sound familiar?

The film provides a startling microcosm of modern society, with its familiar platitudes, empty positivity, and moral peril. Companies market a plethora of artisanal products, from rustic sandwiches to craft beer, which provide an air of bygone authenticity to our endless, destructive consumption and waste. We’re always on the move, preferably driving, preferably a nice big SUV, and preferably alone, in monotonous celebration of our own masterful heroism and success. Now we’ve even switched to an E-vehicle, so we can also imagine we’re single-handedly saving the planet. ‘Be a man! Drive more! The planet won’t save itself!’

It’s the slow apocalypse in progress. Hardly surprising we’re led to wonder what comes after, in one dystopian movie after another. It’s possible to watch The End and think, no, this really doesn’t work. In my view that’s the point. Hollywood musical conventions had a remarkable power to carry us away on a romantic make-believe ride to the Neverland. Oppenheimer picks those conventions apart and, with a Brechtian shock, disconnects us from our beloved dreamscape to cut us adrift in our own mess, the one from which we continually avert our gaze.

In so doing, he cuts to the core of a central modern problem. We have all learnt to create myths of the all-powerful and blessed individual, sacred icon of modern society. We do it day-in day-out. We suffer the ‘slings and arrows’ of accident and circumstance but retroactively represent this to ourselves and others as choices we have made on thoroughly rational grounds. In other words, we rationalise what happened to us and mythologise ourselves as masters of our own destiny. And this is what puts a song in our hearts. For, as masters of our own destiny, we seem romantic, even heroic to ourselves, a little like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain (1952) perhaps…

Here there is definitively no rain and no clear skies either, no real ones anyway, and the message is: ‘Wake up!’ The Hollywood studio is revealed for what it is, a glorified shed, which is so much smaller than we imagined. The action nevertheless commences with a young man entering an apparently spacious drawing-room. It’s also decked out with the finest classical artwork – to the point of excess! The walls are as visually overcrowded as any Victorian-style – more-is-more – picture-gallery. It’s clear they have more masterpieces than they know what to do with. He and we have entered the prodigious luxury of high bourgeois cum-aristocratic accommodations. There’s even room for a scale-model mock-up of one instantly recognisable L.A. destination.

There’s no mistaking the signature, monumental ‘Hollywood’ hillside messaging. This modernist ‘nativity scene’ is lent an extra air of fairytale romance by the addition of a working railway. He proceeds to set it in motion as he breaks, with a strange sort of deliberate rapture, into song. Magically, invisibly, a full orchestra accompanies him. The monumental lettering in miniature was a clue: We’re in classic Hollywood-musical mode.

The music immediately labours against the bounds of the setting. In its struggle to escape it also helps define its confines, and these become increasingly stifling as events unfold. The song is resolutely positive, however, drawing on an optimism as expansive as it is vague. It’s an air of promise in the abstract, open-ended and uplifting. In lyrical form the coming day beckons us towards the light, ‘A perfect morning! If I were a tap, I’d be pouring.’ The sun is shining – but only figuratively of course – as it must in almost any Hollywood musical from its heyday. In this world, studio lights are our sun and the whole wide world can be crammed on demand into the confines of a few square metres of rigging and particleboard.

The world has changed nevertheless, on multiple levels, and we find ourselves in the ‘anti-musical,’ Oppenheimer’s contradictory vehicle of claustrophobic escapism. This really is the limit. This really is The End. We’ve heard such warnings before, so many times, but were we really paying attention? Our delusions and excuses are so hard to shift, it really does bear repeating: We’re all players in a tragedy of more than epic proportions, the uber-tragedy of human times, that epoch of cross-species suffering and devastation we now know as the Anthropocene.

Oppenheimer (aided and abetted by some terrific performances, not least from the irrepressible Tilda Swinton,) distils the essence of this in an unlikely way, in the form of one truly exceptional post-apocalyptic musical.

Well, you might say, There can’t be too many of those in the first place! ‘A few showtunes with your dystopian nightmare, sir?’ I think most would pass. Yet it is precisely this leftfield, counter-intuitive quality that makes the film so special – and demanding! It wasn’t a complete surprise to hear that some moviegoers have struggled. Perhaps they find it perplexing, not to say off-putting, and about as interesting as being trapped underground themselves?

The film may even bomb, but then I would expect it to bomb more like The Night of the Hunter (1955) or Blade Runner (1982) than The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000). I expect it to have a slow-burner, cult-classic future, the aforementioned reservations about all futures notwithstanding. In short, we may not be ready for The End. But we should be. We’d better be!

The great virtue of Joshua Oppenheimer’s digression into ‘sci-fi meets showtunes’ is its capacity to surprise and distress just about everyone: the oligarchs who rule, the henchmen who pull the strings and, not least, the rest of us, the great unwashed masses, who accept our powerlessness and kid ourselves it’s okay. Well, it’s not okay. Indeed, it could be The End.

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Listen to our recent podcast interview with Joshua Oppenheimer.

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