THE END

TIFF 24 REVIEW BY: DARREN ZAKUS

DATE: SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

RATING: 1 out of 5

The End is gorgeous to look at thanks to some impressive camera work and real life shooting locations, and despite a talented cast and two strong singing performances from George Mackay and Moses Ingram, Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative debut misses the mark on being a memorable or even good movie musical.

This review needs to be prefaced with the fact that I am not a musical hater. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. I love musicals! For this fact alone, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End was one of the films I was most looking forward to at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, but it ended up being the biggest personal disappointment of the entire festival. While Oppenheimer was trying to pay tribute to the Golden Age musical and emulate their style, but unlike the beloved musical style he was trying to recreate, there is nothing truly musical about this film. While there is singing as the characters express their emotions through song and the odd bit of dancing, The End never becomes a musical but instead a hollow imitation of what the genre can be.

Following the collapse of humanity, the world’s last family lives in a bunker under the ground having survived due to their privilege, but they are forced to re-examine themselves when an unexpected human survivor discovers their bunker. It’s not exactly the happy material that you would normally associate with a musical, naturally not lending itself to extravagant dance numbers or uplifting anthems. But some of the greatest and most beloved musicals have dealt with tough or darker subject matter, such as Les Misérables and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which does not preclude Oppenheimer and his team from creating a grand musical. And while Josh Schmidt and Marius de Vries’s orchestrations are beautiful and made for a theatre sound system, there is no soul to the songs. The themes themselves are not memorable, the songs do not have lyrics that will get stuck in your head, nor does it help that the cast aside from George Mackay and Moses Ingram are not good singers either. Technically it can be classified as a musical due to the expression of characters’ feelings through song, but there is nothing more that ties The End to the beloved genre of musicals. The story itself and the ideas explored are well written showing the promise Oppenheimer has as a storyteller as he jumps from documentarian filmmaking to narrative filmmaking, but with a runtime of almost two and a half hours partnered with slow pacing and lacklustre musical numbers, there is little present in The End to engage audiences with.

With a lead cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, Mackay and Ingram, it comes as no surprise that the performances are strong. Swinton and Shannon are great as they always are, even if they do struggle when it comes to singing and not having the voices required to match the grand orchestrations (and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t mind Russell Crowe in Les Misérables). Mackay and Ingram continue to impress as they continue to rise in the ranks as talented actors in the business, both showing off decent vocal chops that could get attention for future movie musical projects. And Tim McInnerny, who audiences may recognize from Notting Hill, has a memorable supporting performance, including one notable dance number that may just be one of the best scenes of the entire film.

It’s too bad that the rest of the film does not work, as visually it's gorgeous to look at. The cinematography brings to life the underground bunker with long, moving shots that add life into this single, lifeless location without natural light. The salt mines where the film was shot adds a gorgeous backdrop when outside the family’s residence, creating some striking images for audiences to behold. It adds a cinematic flair to the film, especially during Mackay’s solo number in the first act with him dancing through the salt mines, appearing as a darkened silhouette against the walls of the salt mines which is one of the most gorgeous shots of the year (which is the same image as seen on the film’s poster). 

Bound to be one of the most divisive films of this awards season, you are going to fall into one of two camps after seeing The End. Either you are going to be over the moon with the truly experimental musical Oppenheimer has cooked up, or you are going to be questioning whether this film is a true musical because beyond the signing it's missing everything that makes for a memorable musical. Even with lovely orchestrations brought to life by a full studio orchestra that creates an enchanting soundscape for the film, The End struggles to become a true musical despite the story progressing through song due to its lack of memorable songs and cast members that shouldn’t be singing them.