Rating: NR | Runtime: 148 minutes
Release Date: December 6th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Neon
Director(s): Joshua Oppenheimer
Writer(s): Rasmus Heisterberg & Joshua Oppenheimer

Who could we trust?

There’s no better audience than one that’s never seen anything but the show. That’s what George MacKay is to the other survivors living in this palatial bunker built by an energy magnate (Michael Shannon) and his dancer wife (Tilda Swinton). He is quite literally their entire world now that everything else is gone. So, why not feed him a more palatable version of themselves to better cope with their guilt and shame? Why not paint themselves as heroes for him to look up to and admire since there’s no alternative with which to be compared anyway? Do it for long enough and you might even forget a different truth exists.

The point of Joshua Oppenheimer’s musical The End (co-written with Rasmus Heisterberg) is that they must be reminded if only for us to perhaps prevent ourselves from following suit. How do you do that within a more or less hermetically sealed sanctuary (prison?) populated by those who need the lie to get up in the morning? By introducing someone new. Moses Ingram’s entrance isn’t an instant catalyst for this shift in perspective, but she does light their individual fuses by way of providing a glimpse into a mirror they thought they’d never look at again. Because she knows the “real world.” She was born on the surface and has learned enough about history to know the plight of the poor.

It’s a crucial distinction since MacKay’s entire worldview was cultivated by his parents and their friends (Bronagh Gallagher’s cook, Tim McInnerny’s butler, and Lennie James’s doctor). And since “energy magnates” are hardly heroes within mankind’s descent towards extinction, you can imagine the disparity between what he thinks and what Ingram knows. MacKay is literally writing the book on his dad based upon the anecdotes he’s told about being a man of the people and articles Shannon deems “true” (anything remotely critical that slips through is dismissed as propaganda). So, why wouldn’t he believe workers loved their bosses? Or that working to the bone to bring an employer’s desires to fruition was a point of pride rather than exploitation?

Worse than just this family’s place in the annals of human history, however, are the decisions they made decades ago to maintain this specific mad house of fabricated happiness. That’s the real danger that Ingram poses as an outsider. Not who she is or what she knows, but having the questions they ensured MacKay would never think to ask. Where’s the rest of Shannon and Swinton’s families? Why does Shannon seem to not understand what’s happening when forced to confront something uncomfortable? Why does Swinton freeze as though she’s been unplugged when forced to do the same? Just as Ingram thinks she must fill the cracks in the wall to stay, they all reapply the plaster they’ve smeared over the pain and emotions threatening to shatter their illusion.

It therefore makes sense to set it to music—giving these characters the room to breathe and feel that they refuse to supply themselves. I don’t think it works every time, but I can’t deny the effectiveness when it does (Shannon’s “The Big Blue Sky” and Swinton’s “The Mirror”). These interludes are fantasies that often cut to an entirely different set and moment wherein what occurred is erased. They are projections of what each wants to say but can’t—dreams of honesty cutting through the reality of farce they’ve embraced as a survival mechanism. These are people who’ve created a false narrative to keep from succumbing to the pain of what they did or didn’t do. And it’s a thin enough veneer that MacKay doesn’t need much to begin chipping away.

The result is long at two-and-a-half hours with many passages feeling redundant considering there are so few characters. The idea is that MacKay needs more time to fully be deprogrammed from what they’ve taught him despite us getting it straight away. Thankfully, the cast is fantastic and make those familiar moments shine through the small nuances separating one instance from the next. This is especially true when Gallagher and McInnerny get a brief second to earn the spotlight since they (along with James, who mostly exists in the background) are more about keeping up appearances for Shannon and Swinton than living for themselves within this creature comfort-filled museum hidden inside a salt mine miles below the fires that burn in perpetuity above.

And while MacKay and Ingram are very good as the driving force of this gradual awakening to the nightmare in which they’re all trapped, Shannon and Swinton are the ones doing the heavy emotional lifting by letting the twenty-year-old masks they’ve forgotten were glued to their faces slip. Both deliver as many devastatingly sad flashes as funny ones due to the nature of pretending everything is all right even as they allow themselves the space to acknowledge something the other said is a blatant lie. These two lost souls are so enveloped in their own façade that the real horror of what’s going on isn’t that they should reckon with what they’ve done, but that they’re probably correct to ignore it. Survival depends on their ability to pretend.

It’s a truth I’ve started to accept the past few years as our species continues to destroy itself little by little with an individualist hunger that demands you put your own well-being above everyone else. My real terror isn’t therefore born from the inevitable prospect of an early death. It’s the notion that I might do something horrible enough to become one of the few who survive.

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(l-r) Michael Shannon, George MacKay, Tilda Swinton, and Bronagh Gallagher in THE END; courtesy of Neon.