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‘The End’ Review: Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Took Shelter, but 20 Years Underground Starts to Get Tedious
In 'The End,' Joshua Oppenheimer hatches a musical morality play in which survivors deep underground (and even deeper in denial) consider the future.
With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer approached the documentary form in a radical, seemingly unthinkable way, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served on the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera. Down here, safe from whatever horrors befell humanity, the boy’s parents have maintained whatever sense of culture they can, with the help of a personal doctor (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInnerny), a maid (Danielle Ryan) and an old friend (Bronagh Gallagher) from those earlier times. Together with “Melancholia” production designer Jette Lehmann, Oppenheimer presents an elegantly drab bunker, buried deep in a salt mine but built for comfort — not unlike the Elon Musk-inspired base seen in last year’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” a project that delivers its big-brain ideas through effective genre devices.
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