Is art where we find truth, or where we project our delusions? In his dual Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer invited participants in the 1956-66 Indonesian genocide to re-enact their crimes as theatre. A family member of one of the victims watches some of the footage. He, the audience, and Oppenheimer all seem to be in search of the same thing: some spark of humanity within the monstrosity, some morsel of understanding of how those who commit evil deeds live with the aftermath.
With The End, the director now takes that same, desperate search to the fictional space. Several decades into a climate apocalypse, a billionaire family live deep in a salt mine, in the compact luxury of a survival bunker. And they’ve been granted the gift of song. The End is a musical, though an uncanny spectre of one – artificial skin stretched over the rotted bones of an old MGM spectacular.
