“The End” in the cinema: Music is when you cry anyway

If you want a film role, you should now have a solid vocal training. It hardly goes by without a month without a new musical in the cinema. Joshua Oppenheimer with “The End” now adds the Disney and comic adaptations for the canvas to expand the genre: the arthouse experimental musical.

The film is preceded by a quote from TS Eliot's “Four Quartets”: “The Houses Are All Gone Under The Sea. / The Dancers Are All Gone Under the Hill.” Even if you no longer have the previous lines of the poem (fire storm on earth, downfall in civilization, foolishness of old men), it is clear: The world as we know them is in ruins. We won't see them in the following 148 minutes. Instead, the plot takes place in an underground bunker, the caves of which are so white that they are initially considered snowing until the fine -crystalline salt structure is discovered. There is nothing natural here, machines have milled tunnels and left scratch marks on the walls that work in the bluish light like the thick brush strokes of a climate painting.

In the salt caves, the home of a family, equipped with all sorts of art (“We saved a painting from every stile era”), expensive furniture, tasteful decoration – everything indicates that the refuge was curated with a lot of money long before the flight underground was necessary. Father (Michael Shannon) and Mother (Tilda Swinton) moved into quarters here with a butler, a doctor and a friend when the country went up in flames. You have lived like this for twenty years. The son (George Mackay), who was born here, has grown up.

He has made his own picture of the world out there from the stories of the adults. He converts his father's historical lessons in a diorama in which the construction of the Pacific railway leads past the Hollywood sign. The worldview is faltering when a girl can get access out of outside and challenges the stories of the parents with other facts.

The American director Joshua Oppenheimer has so far drew attention to himself with documentaries (such as “The Act of Killing” about the 1965 massacre in Indonesia). He already challenged narrative and visual habits, for example, had historical scenes of contemporary witnesses re-enacted until one of the murderers is literally brought to chokes by his memories. The end-time musical “The End” is also an experiment. Oppenheimer uses it as an extended chamber game in which family structures are dissected – and he can rely on every single actor.

When the girl talks from outside, Tilda Swinton lets her mouth bound in the background. Michael Shannon gives his patriarch as a shark, whose mere presence speaks a threat with every movement. And George Mackay demonstrates the dying of boyish naivety when knowledge awakens in his eyes. You could safely use it on Broadway if he sings solon numbers such as the swing piece “Alone”. Swinton, on the other hand, uses the oldest musical trick of her British compatriots and pulls their stanzas into the spoken.

Oppenheimer wrote the texts of the songs; Musical composer Joshua Schmidt is responsible for the musical elaboration, as an executing music producer, Marius de Vries was brought on board, who had already taken on this task at “La La Land”. Her work shows that you can not only tell about the end of the world, but also sing. The end of the song, however, means, unlike traditional doomsday stories, do not “morality”.