The End
Tilda Swinton dazzles in Joshua Oppenheimer’s satirical anti-musical, which follows a family that has fled the post-apocalyptic world into a luxury bunker.
25 years after the environment collapsed, a mother, father and son are living in isolation in a luxury bunker in the bowels of a salt mine, clinging to hope and the remains of a normal life by repetitive routines. All things run their course until a young woman enters the family’s closed world.
Instead of feeling claustrophobic, the bunker home is adorned with valuable paintings and elegant decorative objects. The impressionist masterpieces, however, are not windows to the outside world, but distorted snapshots, like the worldview of the people who have been living underground for decades. To stay sane, the inhabitants of the bunker have been recycling the same stories and lies, but the arrival of the woman reveals the tensions simmering beneath the surface, and the family’s seemingly harmonious life gradually begins to unravel.
Having drawn on genres and styles in his award-winning documentaries The Act of Killing (R&A 2013) and The Look of Silence (R&A 2014), Oppenheimer now uses the musical to create satirical layers to his post-apocalyptic survival story. The escapist genre is an ingenious way to depict people trying to keep up appearances and live on the edge of a devastated world as if nothing has happened. The world burns and “all is well.“
Otto Kylmälä (translated by Moritz Müller
Trailer
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