Hyde Park Pick: The End

I get asked regularly if there is anything good coming up. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a hard question but it is. Whilst skills, alongside things like budget and scale, are all tangible factors one can quantify in filmmaking, whether a piece is good or not comes down to a multitude of factors each of which changes when looked at and considered through the individual lens of each unique audience member.

I mention that as I’m about to highlight Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End as my upcoming Hyde Park Pick, a film I know distinctly to be divisive and to be frank, not everyone’s cup of tea. So, I’d like, for a moment, to explain why it very much is mine.

Set twenty-five years after the Earth’s environmental collapse, mother, father and son cling to a sense of normalcy while confined to a palatial bunker. But, when a girl turns up at their doorstep, with her own past and perspective, the family’s blind optimism begins to unravel.

The first drama from the director behind 2012’s The Act of Killing is bold and ambitious on multiple levels. The cast features industry heavyweights like Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and Lennie James, alongside exciting younger talents, Moses Ingram (Lady in the Lake) and George MacKay (1917). The result shares some qualities with a stage play like the tight locations and the intimate cast but the sweeping widescreen format and the visually arresting salt mines Oppenheimer uses for some of the film's more otherworldly scenes are desperately cinematic. Enhanced by the epic Hollywood tone and quality of the musical numbers (yes, the musical numbers) the resulting film feels decidedly grand.

That special glamour of an old school musical sits in tension with a story seeking to get to the core of humanity and some uncomfortable questions like is survival at all costs really living? And more importantly, how can one ever find comfort and peace knowing it has been achieved at the expense of others?

Here perhaps is the nub of the film, and the reason I found it so fascinating even if not a perfect piece of work. Oppenheimer’s Academy award-nominated The Act of Killing was a documentary that challenged a group of former Indonesian death squad leaders to reenact their mass killings in whichever cinematic genres they wished. In doing so, he worked to make a space where he could try and understand how they could rationalise their past crimes and observe how they could then live with those acts today.

Despite the wildly different setting and type of filmmaking, The End is preoccupied with the same questions. The style of the work will sit well with some and not others, but spending time with these questions feels essential in today’s climate and by pulling the story away from factual events and into a fantastic fictional world, Oppenheimer makes room for us to consider complicity. Specifically our complicity. What discomfort and suffering is playing out in this world which we cannot, or choose not to see?

Sometimes not seeing is how we can get through the days, but we have to face this at times and try to do better for everyone’s sake.

The End is showing daily at HPPH from Friday. You can book tickets here.