A quoted review in the new trailer for Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End hails it as “one of the most unique cinematic experiences ever.” Based on the clip Neon dropped today, that might actually be true. The End is a musical (with actual singing in the trailer!) starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, Moses Ingram, and George MacKay set in a one-family apocalypse bunker. Everyone is fashionable and wears perfect sweaters to wander wistfully around their incredibly well-appointed underground home. The musical doesn’t really seem to be about the apocalypse at all, but rather a sheltered kid experiencing love for the first time. Still, the characters are named following Cormac McCarthy-esque end-of-the-world conventions, meaning they don’t have real names at all. They’re simply called Mother, Father, Son, and Girl. If all that isn’t enough to pique your interest, Swinton is also sporting one of the wildest onscreen wigs we’ve seen this year—and we’ve seen a lot of crazy wigs.
The End follows its central family—Father (Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Son (George MacKay) as they go about their daily lives in the underground bunker they call home 25 years after environmental collapse has left the Earth uninhabitable. However, their peaceful routine is upended when a newcomer, Girl (Ingram), arrives and captures the attention of Son, who’s never seen the outside world. “As tensions rise, their seemingly idyllic existence starts to crumble, with long-repressed feelings of remorse and resentment threatening to destroy the family’s delicate balance. But their reckoning with difficult truths also points to a different way forward, one based on acceptance, love, and a capacity for change,” a synopsis reads. Think Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt if the world actually ended, or Fallout if the vaults were a lot bougier and not quite so ’50s.
While movie-musicals have been a bit of a mixed bag this year, Oppenheimer is standing behind his choice. “If the characters’ hearts open to us when they sing, yet even in song they deceive themselves, a frightening question lies at the film’s heart: what remains of us when we lie to ourselves in our dreams and unconscious yearnings?” he wrote in a statement. The director wrote the lyrics while Joshua Schmidt wrote the music.
The End—which originally premiered at Telluride—opens December 6 in New York and LA, and select theaters nationwide December 13.
English (US) ·