The end of the world is usually only thought about with horror. But Joshua Oppenheimer’s unearthly musical drama, set in a fossil-fuel oligarch’s luxury survival bunker, replaces that with something even worse: sadness. And then something even more wrenchingly unbearable; not hope exactly, but a strange sense that it might not be the end, but an evolutionary transitional stage to something else, something unknowable, something that makes humanity’s current state even tinier than simple annihilation.
Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton play the last super-rich couple in the world. He is a breezily self-assured energy magnate and she a former ballerina. After an environmental catastrophe 25 years ago, they retreated from civil disorder, deep underground into an eerily well-appointed suite of rooms with food, air and medicines in which they keep their colossal fine art collection. Their only son (George MacKay) busies himself creating a twee diorama of a quaintly imagined American landscape, and assisting his father with his self-serving autobiography that no one will read – in which he absolves himself of any blame for the climate crisis.
They also have a loyal butler (Tim McInnerny) who cooks them exquisite meals from foodstuffs cultivated in their own lab, an irascible doctor (Lennie James) who sorts out their depression and insomnia with pharmaceuticals, and Swinton’s friend (Bronagh Gallagher) is there from the old days of the theatre to keep up her spirits. They carry out emergency drills with survival suits for if the air supply packs up, and practise on the firing range in case a member of the angry underclass shows up. This worst case scenario becomes a reality when a young woman (Moses Ingram) somehow finds her way into the compound. After a violent confrontation, they decide to make peace and contemplate a new possibility: what if the son is in love with her? And all this with bright, oddly primary-coloured musical interludes and some delicate choreography: a postapocalyptic La La Land.
The musical score might be derivative, but what Oppenheimer is doing here commands attention. He is facing something from which everyone, in art as in life, averts their gaze and the resulting film is far better than others notionally on the same subject, such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia or Adam McKay’s well-intended Don’t Look Up. Shannon and Swinton sing and dance their way around the edge of the volcano, and then around their new feelings about becoming grandparents and what that might mean. There are very good performances, but especially from Shannon who is subtle and sometimes even sympathetic, considering that his character is the author of this entire situation.
For some, this film will be too oppressive in its pure sober seriousness. A completely sung-through opera version might yet be produced in Bayreuth or Vienna. I can’t stop thinking about it.
• The End is in UK cinemas from 28 March.
