Critics reviews

The End is a bold project, and a quixotic one – a somewhat glacial film for which it is hard to imagine a substantial audience, notwithstanding energetic performances from an eminent cast headed by Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton.

The End is Oppenheimer’s first film as a dramatist. It is beautifully made; even the salt mine is oddly spectacular. You just wouldn’t want to live there. The performances sing with or without music, the cast sharp as sushi knives. MacKay and his haunted deadpan are particularly good.

The End is concerned with the lies we tell ourselves to keep going... The actors are all supremely committed – particularly Swinton as the willowy, unravelling Mother – and the production design is a marvel.

The End is a musical, though an uncanny spectre of one – artificial skin stretched over the rotted bones of an old MGM spectacular.

Unlike Oppenheimer’s previous films, it feels like there’s an elusive ingredient missing that’s stopping [The End] being a masterpiece. Although it wouldn’t be surprising if a reappraisal in a couple of decades declared it to be so. It’s that type of movie.

What Oppenheimer is doing here commands attention. He is facing something from which everyone, in art as in life, averts their gaze and [The End] is far better than others notionally on the same subject, such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia or Adam McKay’s well-intended Don’t Look Up... I can’t stop thinking about it.

The End is an audacious and daring formal experiment... Oppenheimer’s film constructs a mesmerising fantasy from the rubble of a scorched Earth, suggesting that the end is never really the end — it’s a new beginning.

There’s an enthralling energy [to The End] that bursts out of the screen... Where the film really sings is in its depiction of buried guilt and false hope.

I must confess that the synopsis of Oppenheimer’s film I read before attending a press screening last month had me braced for another of these cine-pachyderms: it is a musical about a cosseted family that survives a climate apocalypse. Yet The End progresses from scene to scene with grace and intelligence, viewers never quite knowing what to expect next.

Does [The End] work? No, except for when it does... Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

Oppenheimer’s film is practically a dissertation on the mellifluous to atonal tension between who we are and who we think and tell ourselves that we are.

The End paradoxically feels ornamental and operatic while at the same time almost iconographic in its simplicity.