The End review – get prepped for a singalong apocalypse

Back in 2011 the craggily imposing Michael Shannon starred in Take Shelter, a disquieting drama set in rural Ohio. He played a construction worker so haunted by visions of a looming cataclysm that he borrowed more than his young family could afford to convert their backyard tornado shelter into a proper survival bunker. This obsession alienated his wife and the wider community; as with a lot of stories preoccupied with doomsday, things did not end well.

Shannon goes underground again for The End, another unsettling film that unfolds in the shadow of an apocalypse. But this time he’s no blue-collar underdog scrambling for canned goods. Instead he plays a puffed-up oilman who has leveraged his wealth to stay one step ahead of a climate change calamity that has scuttled the world.

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Along with his trophy wife (Tilda Swinton), this billionaire evacuated over two decades ago to a luxurious sanctuary hollowed out of a salt mine. There, Father and Mother – presumably proper names aren’t that important when you might be the last people on Earth – have raised a Son (George MacKay) who has never known anything else.

It is not the usual dingy gloom of nuclear bunker living. With spacious rooms, priceless art on the walls and well-stocked bookshelves this decadent prepper’s paradise could just as easily be the setting of a country house whodunnit, complete with a bumbling Butler (Tim McInnerny).

The Cluedo-like cast is filled out by a sole family Friend (Bronagh Gallagher from Brassic) and an attending Doctor (Lennie James) who has maintained a prickly bedside manner. But with no shortage of good food and booze, this odd upstairs-downstairs sextet seems to be merrily rolling along, with only the occasional safety drill interrupting their languid daily routines.

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That coddled existence is threatened by the arrival of a young woman (Moses Ingram), the group’s first glimpse of another human being in years. There are dark allusions to what happened to previous survivors who came looking for help but while the adults are keen to kick her out pronto, Son is fascinated by meeting someone his own age from a place he has never known.

So Ingram’s worldly Girl is brought into the fold and cannot help but disrupt the equilibrium, throwing into sharp relief the weirdness of their mollified existence. That sense of artificial reality is underlined by the fact that The End is surprisingly but unashamedly a musical, with a sweeping, old-fashioned orchestral score by Josh Schmidt and Marius De Vries.

Characters bursting into song is not as reality-breaking as it might sound (after being cooped up for so many years, the Overton window could easily shift to include showtunes). The actors doing their own singing also adds to the odd sense of plausibility while the snowy, scalloped tunnels of the salt mine are a suitably otherworldly backdrop for dance numbers.

It is an audacious theatrical conceit and perhaps not what you might expect from Joshua Oppenheimer, a director best-known as a documentarian. But his Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) interrogated the nature of performance, as ageing Indonesian gangsters happily restaged the brutal killings and tortures they carried out during a wave of state-sponsored anti communist violence in the mid-1960s.

Obliviousness in the face of oblivion feels like a very human failing. The End is concerned with the lies we tell ourselves to keep going. If Father feels at all guilty for his role in accelerating the end of the world, he buries it underneath the self-aggrandising prose of the memoir he is co-authoring with his increasingly suspicious Son.

The actors are all supremely committed – particularly Swinton as the willowy, unravelling Mother – and the production design is a marvel. But the inertia of decades spent pottering about in isolation seems to bleed into the film itself. Over the course of almost two and a half hours, it never quite manages to tunnel out of its allegorical fuzziness. The songs, while lush and romantic, become part of the subterranean wallpaper rather than dramatic exclamation marks.

You could file it alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s daffy alt-history epic Megalopolis (2024) or even Darren Aronofsky’s climate catastrophe fever dream Mother! (2017) as a grand cinematic folly that dazzles even if it eventually fizzles. But our world, for however long it might still exist, is better off for having such big artistic swings in it.

The End is in cinemas from 28 March

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