Barely 60 minutes into director Joshua Oppenheimer’s two-and-a-half-hour apocalyptic musical The End, some Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) attendees were leaving.
But before it began, the Oscar nominated director captivated the audience with a brief yet impactful speech about his fictional feature debut.
This film is about “obscuring ourselves, from ourselves,” he told a packed Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre Wednesday evening.
However, it soon came to light that for some audience members obscuring oneself from oneself meant leaving halfway through the movie.
Even a string of stand out performances from the film’s illustrious cast, which includes George Mackay, (1917, How I Live Now, Peter Pan) Tilda Swinton, (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Trainwreck, The Chronicles of Narnia) Michael Shannon, (The Shape of Water, Take Shelter, Revolutionary Road) and Moses Ingram, (“The Queen’s Gambit,” The Tragedy of Macbeth) could not stop disappointed movie buffs from scuffling away.
They had made up their minds, the bizarre bleakness of this indulgent, snail-paced musical-thriller wasn’t for them, and I understand why.
Nonetheless, unlike the early escapees, I was hopeful that The End would resurrect itself.
Though peppered with great moments, Oppenheimer’s endeavour to marry two diametric genres is ultimately ill-fated.
The film follows a fabulously wealthy family who made their fortune through morally bankrupt means, and are partially to blame for a slew of environmental catastrophes that rendered them the last known people on earth.
Nevertheless, they continue to live lavishly in an elaborately constructed subterranean bunker.
But their inherently icky existence is abruptly upended by a survivor who stumbles across their kitschy cave.
Much to the stranger’s surprise, unfathomably valuable paintings cling to the walls of the family’s underground mansion. Food and resources remain inexplicably in abundance, and staff, including an in-house doctor, chef and butler are permanently on hand.
But their home’s ornate furnishings and ample supplies fail to fill the hollowness of their hearts or the cavernous nothingness that surrounds them. I suspect this is why none of the characters are named, an apt creative choice, given their lack of substance.
It is precisely this that brings me to the film’s most impressive feature; the desolate dugout encasing their living quarters, which bears likeness to a skeletal rib cage enmeshed in a network of bloodless veins that feed a soulless cavity.
The End is speckled with flashes of brilliant imagery like this. In one scene, Swinton and Shannon’s characters engage in an icy, sing-songy conversation in their bathroom.
Her reflection is visible in every mirror and in all directions, while only his back and face can be seen; her infinitely reflected frame serving as a visual marker of her self-absorbed nature, put simply, wherever she looks, she sees herself.
However, its best bits are overshadowed by painfully on-the-nose political commentaries, dialogue that awkwardly trips over itself, and unsettling musical numbers that seemed to send some viewers into authentic fits of laughter and others into uncontrollable bouts of snickering.
Except for an objectively hilarious moment where MacKay and Ingram’s characters engage in an impromptu farting contest, I fell into the latter category, unsure whether to laugh at or with the film, which left me feeling confused and uncertain of what it was trying to achieve.
While genre-bending movies can produce something novel and superb, The End does not achieve this.
It was clear to me that some viewers found The End’s non-conformist elements deeply funny and profound, but to others they were embarrassing and silly.
Despite this, the film is well-acted, visually spectacular and bolstered by a handful of genuinely amusing comedic turns that bind an otherwise very long and quite dull sequence of disjointed scenes together.
If the goal of The End is to divide audiences to such a degree that some are deeply moved and others utterly dazed then I suppose it’s an excellent film. But, if Oppenheimer’s aim was to collectively suspend moviegoers in profound amazement, The End, for lack of a better phrase, is a poorly conceived flop.
