The singing isn’t very good in The End but that’s not really a bad thing.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s intermittently fascinating and exhausting post-apocalyptic musical, starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, is about a family sheltered by their own insidious privilege, trying to maintain a cheery disposition despite the grim circumstances that surround them. The world has essentially burned to the ground. Shannon’s former energy sector executive minimizes the role he played in that. The safety they’ve secured for themselves deep down in a salt mine has come with costly human sacrifice (not theirs, mind you). So when they’re belting out show tunes about how the “future is bright”, voices crackling across a melody that has a few too many down notes, they’re not exactly selling us – or themselves – on the alternate reality they’ve built in their own minds. Oppenheimer’s musical refuses to indulge the escapism we usually count on the genre for.
