The End

Joshua Oppenheimer is not afraid of a challenge... the same is true of George MacKay.

The whole enterprise is weirdly compelling and oddly flat at the same time. And those tunes? Showstoppers? Not quite, although by the end, their deliberately old-fashioned hokeyness grows on you.

It’s all meaty stuff for a think piece, but rather less swallowable as a film.

In a way, The End is exactly the kind of risk-taking venture you would expect and even hope for from a visionary director such as Oppenheimer. I just wish I liked it more.

It’s funny, in a deeply grotesque way. No line is ever directly played for laughs by Shannon, Swinton, or McKay, their selfish myopia reading naturally as true to life. But, as they say, you have to laugh or else you’ll cry.

Even if the film can feel airless at times, with long, solid shots of the survivors’ banal everyday lives, it does have much to say on the foibles of mankind – and the way society may very feasibly backslide into, well, The End.

It's a mournful post-apocalyptic musical with an ecological undertone, which could have been a brave attempt at the unconventional, but instead ends up in a narrative uphill battle...[Full review in Spanish]

The End is a very formally risky film, with a deep critical charge of society and class differences. [Full review in Spanish]

[The End is] a film about representation...and, with musical numbers, dialogue, and performances that are completely off the grid, distorts any obvious idea about the fear of the future. [Full review in Spanish]

...a post-apocalyptic musical that starts with an interesting idea, but becomes tiring and unbearable in its insistence that all its characters have a voice. [Full review in Spanish]