Aaron's Thoughts
It isn’t too often in modern cinema that you go to a film & see something that you’ve never seen before.
An audacious swing from Joshua Oppenheimer, “The End” interrogates the lies we tell ourselves & how we cope with them in one of the most unconventional ways imaginable. A 148 minute golden age musical set deep in the confines of a salt mine with the last family on earth.
When you first hear the premise & style, it is undoubtedly a head scratcher. Your mind starts to understand it once spend just a few moments deep in the salt mines. You realize that the family’s home (which they have worked so hard to convince themselves is normal) is no more real than the sound stages from the golden age musicals that inspired it.
It is inside that facade of a home where we find an echo chamber of guilt and pushed aside grief that manifests itself in different ways with each member of the family. It is in those differences & how they all meld together where “The End” really succeeds.
It isn’t without its flaws though. The ideas, while clear, take much longer than needed to play out. This is especially evident when anyone but George McKay & Moses Ingram are singing (both of which are absolute standouts here). The choice to cast Tilda Swinton & Michael Shannon in roles where they are asked to carry a tune & also convey necessary emotion is almost enough to make the film teeter off course (and it probably will be for some).
You won’t leave the theater with any particular song stuck in your end, but the themes will burrow deep in your mind much like the family in the salt mine.
Movies like this don’t come around very often.
