Joshua OppenheimerÂ
Life on the planet’s surface has become nigh-on unbearable, but with money and resources enough, the finest feelings and highest aspirations of our culture can be perpetuated underground, albeit only for a chosen few.
In Joshua Oppenheimer’s unearthly drama The End, Michael Shannon plays the father, an oil magnate who, years ago, brought his family to safety in an old mine. Here, he rewrites his history and that of his company in a self-serving memoir dictated to his grown-up but inexperienced son (George MacKay, whom I last encountered in sci-fi drama The Beast). His wife, the son’s mother, played by Tilda Swinton, curates an art collection purloined from the world’s great collections.
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The mine (a real working salt mine in Petralia BA: Should this be Petralia? (Soprana, Italy) is simultaneously a place of wonder and constriction. The family can walk out of the bunker and wander around its galleries, singing as they go (did I mention this was a musical?), but were they to hike outside the mine, I wouldn’t fancy their chances.
It is a premise familiar from Return to the Planet of the Apes and last year’s streaming hitFallout. And when a rare surface-dweller (Moses Ingram) stumbles on their home, it looks as though she will be expelled – more likely killed – to keep this Shangri-La a secret. But, at the last moment, the son cries: “I don’t want to do this!” It turns out nobody else wants to either, not even the mother, who is the most terrified of the bunch.
Lies stand between us and despair. They create bubbles in which kindness, generosity and love can be grown
Clumsily, over 2.5 hours, the family draws this young stranger into their bubble of comforting lies. Lies – this is the film’s shocking premise – are necessary. Lies stand between us and despair. They create the bubbles in which kindness, generosity and love can be grown. Like the golden-age musicals of the 1950s to which it pays homage, The End tells an optimistic tale (details of which follow – you have been warned).
The visitor resists assimilation at first – she can’t forgive herself for abandoning her family on the surface. Living as if she belonged to this new family would be to let herself off the hook.
Worn down by her honesty, the family reveals its complicity in the end of the world. The father’s industry set fire to the sky. The mother finally admits she wants Earth’s surface to be uninhabitable. If it isn’t, the family she abandoned might be alive and suffering. Her best friend, the son’s confidante (Bronagh Gallagher), who also lives in the mine, in fact sacrificed her child to ensure her own survival.
But then, bit by bit, this wounded and reconfigured family sews itself a new cocoon of lies and silences, taboos and songs (and those songs are accomplished and astonishing), all to make life not just bearable, but possible. Of course, the stranger ends up absorbed in this effort. Of course, she ends up singing along. Wouldn’t you, in time?
Whoever these people used to be, and however much you point accusing fingers at their past, the fact is that they are all good people, singing their way back into the delusion that they must carry on, day after subterranean day.
True, the lies we tell today tell us tomorrow. But this unlikely, left-field musical (my early pick for the sci-fi movie of 2025) is prepared to forgive its characters. We can only get through life by lying, so is it any wonder we make mistakes? Should the worst happen, we might at least be permitted to go down singing.
Simon also recommends…
Aniara
Pella KĂĄgerman and Hugo Lilja
On demand
Adapted from the epic sci-fi poem by Harry Martinson, Aniara follows doomed starliner passengers into the void.
Kurt Vonnegut (Penguin Books)
Billy Pilgrim turns injury into elegy as he relives war’s horrors for a host of puzzled aliens.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on X @simonings
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