The most frustrating thing about The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer’s first fiction feature film, the wildly ambitious, catastrophically self-indulgent post-apocalyptic musical The End, is how close it comes to greatness. Set entirely in an oligarch’s luxury bunker concealed in a former salt mine several decades after an environmental and societal collapse, the film’s production design is a triumph, the layers of sublimated memories and inconvenient truths papered over with immaculate and moneyed interior design.
The performances are mannered but work rather well given the rigorous artificiality of the backdrop. Michael Shannon plays the energy tycoon father, Tilda Swinton his brittle, mercurial wife, George MacKay their sheltered, half-formed adult son and Moses Ingram is a standout as a lone survivor from the outside world. And while it’s set some time in the future, the themes of an ultra-wealthy elite who think nothing of sacrificing the rest of humanity to preserve their own affluence and comfort – well, let’s just say it all feels uncomfortably timely.
