By M. Faust

One of the hardest movies I ever sat through was Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2014 documentary The Act of Killing.

In it, Oppenheimer interviews men who were hired by the Indonesian military in 1964 to slaughter “communists,” ostensibly members of the Communist Party of Indonesia which had recently attempted a coup but really anyone Major General Suharto considered an enemy.

As many as a million Indonesians were killed with horrifying violence, and the perpetrators have never been tried. In fact, the subjects of Oppenheimer’s interviews live openly in their communities and were happy to discuss their crimes in detail that is hard to stomach. (The same is true of the film’s sequel, 2016’s The Look of Silence.) 

The oddest thing about Killing are scenes in which these murderers are invited to re-stage their crimes for the camera as if they were being adapted for a Hollywood movie. It hammers home the point that guilt is not imposed from outside: it has to come from within. And the lack of guilt in these men is just as hard to bear as are the descriptions of their crimes. 

It took Oppenheimer a long time to follow up those films, and his new movie, The End, opening Friday at the North Park Theater, is unlikely to be what anyone following his career might have expected. For one thing, it’s a fiction film with an impressive cast, led by Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. For another, it’s a musical. It’s a post-apocalyptic domestic drama with a soupçon of Tennessee Williams. 

Don’t for a moment think, though, that the filmmaker has gone Hollywood. The End is set a quarter of a century after world civilization has collapsed, presumably as a result of climate change.

It is set entirely in a luxurious underground bunker built in an old salt mine, inhabited by a family and a few friends and aides. Shannon is the Father (no one is ever referred to by name), who became very wealthy in the energy business. Swinton is the Mother, who claims to have been a famous ballerina. About the only person who believes that is the Son (George MacKay), who is 20-something and was born here. Also inhabiting this haven are the mother’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who doubles as a maid; a butler (Tim McInnerny); and a doctor (Lennie James). 

The songs (lyrics by Oppenheimer, music by Broadway composer Josh Schmidt) are of the Steven Sondheim variety: declamatory, richly orchestrated, not tuneful in the usual sense, occasionally approaching oratorio a la The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

What you immediately suspect about the one that opens the film, in which all six sing to each other “What a wonderful gift you have given us/A good life with no end in sight,” is true of all of these songs: they’re bullshit, lies they are telling themselves to avoid the equal awfulness of the past they escaped and the inevitable, hopeless future. 

For people this rich, what they escaped actually means what they chose to leave behind. Such willfully repressed memories are brought to mind when a stranger enters their compound and they decide to permit her to stay. (Many in the past were not so lucky.) As seems dramatically inevitable, she is a girl (Moses Ingram), about the same age as the Son, and you can write for yourself at least some of what comes next. 

You have to write for yourself a lot of this story, because Oppenheimer, who co-wrote the script with Rasmus Heisterberg, provides very few details. I only know that the setting is the inside of a salt mine from reading other reviews; I thought it was a glacier of some kind.

Was the Father rich enough to have built this for himself? It must have taken years. And how did he acquire all the art masterworks that the Mother is perpetually re-arranging? It is clear that the Son is the repository of all of parents’ opinions and fears, but is that all he knows of the world he has never seen? What kind of books does he read? Do they not have DVDs to watch? 

Oppenheimer clearly doesn’t want you to be distracted by details, but it’s impossible not to be struck by them at just about every moment. The Friend smokes: do cigarettes really have a shelf life of 25 years? The Doctor has a well-stocked pharmacy: how much was whoever filled it able to anticipate? Just how responsible was the Father for the catastrophe that made the planet unlivable? Does the amount of the guilt he’s repressing matter? 

The biggest question I had was this: what in god’s name were these people thinking bringing a child into this dead world? Did they think that they would be able to offer him any kind of worthwhile life, one that he would likely have to bear alone after the rest of them have died? 

I had a lot of trouble with The End. It is certainly a brave film, but it’s hard to say  what we’re meant to take away from it, other than a crushing belief that people are able wholly to give themselves over to any kind of lies that they want to believe. (As if we hadn’t already figured that out in the past month.)

Its pessimism about the human condition may be well earned, but at two and one half hours in length, it may be a more punishing lesson than a lot of people are willing to endure.

The End opens Friday, Dec. 13, at the North Park Theatre and will be running through the next week.