The End (2024), directed and co-written by Joshua Oppenheimer, is a dystopian musical set 25 years after an environmental catastrophe renders Earth uninhabitable. The story follows a wealthy family – Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), and their son (George MacKay) – living in isolation within a luxurious underground bunker. Their carefully curated routines and self-mythologizing are disrupted when a stranger, Girl (Moses Ingram), stumbles upon their refuge.

As tensions rise, the arrival of the Girl forces the family to confront their past decisions, including their complicity in the environmental collapse. Through musical numbers and introspective moments, the film explores themes of guilt, denial, and survival. Featuring a strong ensemble cast, The End combines haunting visuals with an experimental narrative, offering a poignant yet unsettling reflection on privilege and accountability in the face of global disaster.

Joshua Oppenheimer is an American documentary filmmaker whose work explores the nature of memory, complicity and power through radical cinematic language. His films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), unpack the unresolved traumas of the Indonesian genocide, pushing the boundaries of the documentary form. His distinctive approach, in which the reconstruction of the past becomes a performative act, has made him a defining figure in contemporary cinema over the last decade.
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The End (2024) is Oppenheimer's first feature-length fiction film, which explores the moral paradoxes of privilege, responsibility and survival in the form of a post-apocalyptic musical. The story follows a family living in an isolated luxury bunker who are forced to confront their past at the moment of an alien arrival. In this film, too, the director explores the mechanisms of human self-deception, combining grandiose visuals and music with radical social reflection.