Kritiken

Among the many onscreen depictions of the AIDS crisis, The Living End stands out because of its rough edges thanks to a low-budget, confrontational story that holds little back. It’s an angry, campy, and poignant statement by Gregg Araki.

[The Living End] takes the well-intended but patronizing AIDS weepies of the time and throws them into a seething vat of blood, sweat, and semen... A fairy godfather to gender fluid zoomers, Araki can lay claim to a legacy that’s all over 21st-century teen screens, where everything feels like the dramatically overblown end of the world—for better or worse, there’s no Euphoria without him.

The Living End remains [Araki's] most powerful meditation on queer disillusionment and anger... [It] is a terrific entry into the New Queer Cinema canon buoyed by a mixture of nihilism, anger and despair. Araki crafts a movie that speaks to marginalised communities, giving one big middle finger towards authority.

Made on a shoestring of $20,000, as a piece of film-making [The Living End] is remarkable. Impressively shot and pulling no punches, its a good example of risk-taking, independent film, that could best be described as a punk, in-your-face response to the culture of the time.

[Araki's] explosive film remains quite raw today, thanks to its jarring low-budget production values... As a portrait of late-millennial nihilism, “The Living End” rejects the sympathetic bent of every afflicted-by-AIDS portrayal before or since. Rather than pitying themselves, the doomed duo simply decides to hate the world.

"The Living End" is raw, dangerous and nihilistic... You can view the film narrowly as commentary on the soul-crushing fury of being HIV positive, or take a few steps back and see Araki's film in a more universal sense as the disintegration of human values caused by an obsessive culturewide drive for self-satisfaction and indifference to others... Araki remains one of our most fascinating filmmakers. He never plays it safe.

It is obvious that Gregg Araki's film desperately wants to be an angry, nihilistic, anti-establishment Thelma & Louise for gay men. Instead, it ends up as a road trip from hell with two fatalistic and fatally dull HIV-positive tour guides.

[The Living End is] a queer 'couple-on-the-lam' movie, crammed with genre memories but closer to a bent Pierrot le Fou than to anything out of Hollywood... [The characters'] aimless, fuck-the-world rampage through the void of Middle America has the same weight and impact as a good Act-Up slogan or a solid punk thrash. Groovy.

Low-budget, high-octane... The Living End has an energy that belies its impoverished finances... Aesthetically and politically this is an instant film. It is immediate, desperate and intentionally disturbing.

Emotionally urgent, The Living End excites you about the state of independent filmmaking; it's a road movie that leaves a skid mark on the psyche. Director-screenwriter Araki taps into something very primal in the film's depiction of its two opposites that attract.

[A] savagely funny, sexy and grieving cry from the heart... Araki gives his hypnotic film a raw intensity heightened by a surreal landscape and a jagged score from the likes of Braindead Sound Machine, KMFDM and Coil.

Punctuated with natural sounds and cutting-edge music, “The Living End” is a new kind of movie for [Araki], who retains his starkly beautiful vision of a lonely, nihilistic L.A. but who moves for the first time into genre, in this case the road movie.