The End: Mark Kermode’s scifi film review (video).

Just when you thought the apocalypse had exhausted every possible genre mash-up, along comes ‘The End’, Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2024 offering—a musical spectacle set in the cheery surroundings of a post-apocalyptic bunker. Because, obviously, after the world ends, what humanity really craves is jazz hands and existential ballads.

Starring Tilda Swinton (who else?), Michael Shannon, and George MacKay, ‘The End’ locks a wealthy clan away in a salt mine-turned-deluxe bunker following global environmental catastrophe. Think Downton Abbey meets Fallout, with added family dysfunction and occasional bursts into song. The family, comfortably wealthy yet uncomfortably isolated, is led by Swinton’s ‘Mother’, whose commitment to pristine decor is as unsettling as it is amusing. Shannon, embracing his role as an ex-oil tycoon turned remorseful memoirist, also manages to sing and dance—truly the multitalented corporate villain the apocalypse deserves.

The arrival of Moses Ingram’s enigmatic Girl, a survivor from the surface world, shakes things up with all the subtlety of a radioactive meteor strike. Romance, suspicion, philosophical disputes about morality and a few good old-fashioned identity crises follow. All, of course, set to music, because existential dread is always better with choreography.

Oppenheimer, known for films that usually make one reflect sombrely on humanity’s darkest impulses, now asks us to do so while humming along. The film is ambitious, and while critics can’t quite agree if it’s a work of inspired genius or just very posh karaoke at the end of the world, you have to admire its sheer audacity.

Whether you find the family’s dramatic dilemmas poignant or hilariously overwrought depends largely on your tolerance for watching the upper classes grapple musically with survivor’s guilt. Michael Shannon crooning about environmental ethics? Worth the price of admission alone. Tilda Swinton ensuring bunker perfection while the world burns above? Delightfully on brand.

Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we’re always up for something that takes risks—even if those risks involve tap-dancing millionaires in an underground lair. Sure, ‘The End’ may be a bit uneven and perhaps a tad too enamoured with itself, but it’s certainly one of the more inventive apocalypse scenarios we’ve seen recently. After all, if civilisation’s curtain is going to fall, it might as well fall dramatically—and preferably with a snappy dance number.