The odd, accidental synchronicity of the movie business brought us double volcano movies, double asteroid/comet movies, double Pinocchio movies and double Truman Capote movies in rapid succession, along with four body-swapping movies over two years back in the 1980s. But “The End,” which premiered on Saturday night at the Telluride Film Festival, may be part of the weirdest trend in cinematic coincidence of them all: film-festival movies that are musicals, even though there’s absolutely nothing in the subject matter to make you think they should be.
First there was Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” which caused a sensation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival by taking a story of a Central American drug lord who undergoes gender reassignment surgery and filling it with songs. The Venice Film Festival struck next with “Joker: Folie à Deux,” which finds Todd Phillips turning his sequel to the Oscar-winning 2019 drama “Joker” into a musical, although Phillips insists that it’s not a musical, it’s just a movie where the character can’t express himself in words so he sings. (Sounds an awful lot like the definition of a musical to me, but whatever.)
And now Joshua Oppenheimer, best known for the chilling 2012 documentary “The Act of Killing,” has made his narrative debut with a movie in which Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, Moses Ingram and others face the apocalypse from an underground mansion where, you guessed it, they sing.
And no, they don’t sing show tunes to pass the time; they sing their thoughts, substituting melody for conversation in a way that’s occasionally reminiscent of sung-through musicals like Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” though the songs are deployed more sparingly. It’s a jarring, at times baffling conceit, though the point of it becomes clear: songs are artifice and fantasy, and so is the life that these people have painstakingly created inside an abandoned salt mine in the worst of times.
The details of what has put them there are sketchy, but they’re clearly hiding from a world that has essentially become uninhabitable and barbaric. Their home has been carved out of the walls of the salt mine, but the interiors look like rooms in a lavish, old-fashioned estate, with famous works of art fighting for space on every wall. All of the comforts of home are here, in this fortified underground bunker that has a seemingly unending supply of … well, everything you might want or need.
The mother (Swinton, who also produced the film with Oppenheimer and Signe Byrge Sorensen) wakes up in the night gasping in fear, but fighting to appear as cheery as possible; the father (Shannon) is a former energy tycoon who seems to harbor some guilt over what he and his ilk have done to the planet; the son (MacKay, the star of “1917”) has spent his entire life in the bunker, which contributes to his remarkable facility at building scale models of famous places, as well as his occasionally shocking naivete. There’s a cook (Bronagh Gallagher), a doctor (Lennie James) and an all-purpose aide (Tim McInnerny).
Because their entire existence has an exercise in denial, the house is essentially a set, a glorious fake. What’s happening within it is a giant piece of fiction held in place by a fierce determination to pretend that everything’s OK.
It’s a sign of things to come when the son begins his morning by flashing an insipid smile and warbling, “I knew this would be a perfect morning / No one is stirring.” Like mom and dad, he tends to sing his songs facing the camera, playing to an unseen audience that needs to be impressed by his flawless existence. He and his family are out of time in more ways than one – and because they exist in this place where nothing ever changes, they must convince themselves that they’re enjoying this artificial, timeless existence.
Everything is stilted, odd, nervous; there’s laughter, but it’s always forced. You could say that it feels awkward when they break into song – but in truth, their conversations at the dinner table feel awkward, too.
Oppenheimer cultivates an air of dread from the opening frames, aided by Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krichman (“Leviathan”), who lets his camera caress the lavish furnishings – but it’s the deep, foreboding shadows inside the salt tunnels that surround the living quarters that haunt the entire film.
And in one of those tunnels, the family finds a young woman played by Ingram (“The Queen’s Gambit”), who has somehow made her way into the bunker from the outside, where her family had been struggling to survive. To say she upsets the dynamic of the family would be an understatement, but of course, they try not to let that show. Before long, family relationships begin to fray and everything starts coming apart slowly – not that it was ever really held together, except by the force of will and illusion.
Though the two films couldn’t be more different, there’s a clear connection between what Oppenheimer does in “The End” and the way he powerfully explored the world of storytelling and artifice in “The Act of Killing.” In that Oscar-nominated documentary, the perpetrators of mass killings in Indonesia in the 1960s re-enacted their crimes and also performed musical numbers, with their bold flights of fantasy grounded in a horrible reality. In “The End,” the fictional distance softens things, making parts of the film audacious and other parts perplexing.
Most of the songs from Joshua Schmidt and Marius de Vries aren’t especially memorable, but they’re not exactly designed to be; they’re monologues, more amorphous than hummable or hooky, though a couple of them (including a stately little ditty in which Shannon’s character embroiders some details about his courtship of his wife) manage to stand out.
Among the cast, Bronagh Gallagher, the Irish actress and musician who first sang onscreen in “The Commitments” in 1991, is the most persuasive performer. MacKay is suitably tentative, Shannon does a creditable job on material that sometimes forces him into a pinched falsetto and Swinton is strained and a bit screechy – though the fact that she’s Tilda Swinton makes is entirely plausible that she sings like this not because she’s a bad singer, but because she’s decided that’s how her character should sound.
They sing, they dance, they dress up in fancy costumes and put on shows for each other – but they also argue, fight and struggle. Everyone, it seems, feels guilty for leaving people behind when they fled to the perfect refuge. Everyone is afraid of being alone. Everyone knows that the forced gaiety of a New Year’s Eve costume ball is ridiculous.
In truth, the movie can be pretty ridiculous, too, with its wild ambition sometimes coming across as a little foolhardy. But overreaching might be the whole point of “The End,” which offers an end-times prescription for living: Hold the fantasy together as long as you can. And when in doubt, sing.
“The End” will be released by NEON.
