‘The End’ Review: Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Took Shelter, but 20 Years Underground Starts to Get Tedious
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer approached the documentary form in a radical, seemingly unthinkable way, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served on the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera.
Why should his narrative debut be any more conventional? For “The End,” Oppenheimer conceives a peculiar post-apocalyptic musical, confined to an underground bunker where an elite set of people have hoarded fine art and expensive wines for a cataclysm that, perversely enough, they may well have instigated.
Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about a “very wealthy, very dangerous family” (in his words), but ultimately chose to steer the project in a very different direction.
With its turgid 148-minute running time and defiant lack of compelling conflict, “The End” doesn’t pander to mainstream sensibilities.
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