TIFF 2024 Review: The End
The End (2024)
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
Starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James
As seen at The End’s Canadian Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). All images courtesy of TIFF.
An ensemble post-apocalyptic chamber piece with musical elements? A cast featuring a perfect blend of young, dynamic actors and veteran talent? I’m listening.
Add in a uniquely varied set design, impeccable lighting, and blocking that allows actors to breathe within the heaviness of the subject matter, and you’ve got Joshua Oppenhemeir’s first narrative feature, The End.
A few minutes in I assumed this, my first screening at TIFF would be my favorite, and I was witnessing a film that would either garner the accolades of recent ambitious movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Poor Things (2023), or be misunderstood and panned like the highly ambitious Annette (2021).
What I got was neither, unfortunately. Instead, Oppenheimer takes us on a rudderless journey that his talented cast tries to salvage, scene after scene, but can’t. The musical elements sink any chance of a cohesive flow to what likely started as an earnest screenplay about a family living in a bunker after the world ended. There are moments of compassionate, challenging dialogue as the characters attempt to maintain the sheen of “Everything is going to be OK” while knowing full well it’s not. However, these moments are interrupted by non sequitur songs that are instantly forgettable—dare I say, forced out of memory the moment they end.
The End is aptly named because the film feels like it should have ended multiple times but Oppenheimer chooses to drag us along on an adventure that he is never quite confident enough to resolve. As I glanced around the ornate, packed Princess of Wales Theatre, I spotted several sleeping viewers and an even larger number of inconsiderate attendees checking their phones, either for the time or for a way out of this feature that seemed so promising in its opening scenes.
The execution of this self-described “eight-year vision” is truly a shame. Each actor has a unique singing voice, and with better songs—ones that felt less like exposition dumps and more like musical adventures—this film could have truly shined. Alternatively, if all the musical aspects had been cut and the runtime trimmed down to a succinct 90 minutes (instead of 148), the story could have had more emotional focus. We get neither, and by the time the film finally ended, the reluctant claps from the TIFF audience were either out of Canadian politeness or sheer relief that The End was, at long last, over.
