The End review - surreality in the salt mine

The End, a quasi-musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously only produced documentaries, is a surreal examination of a group of individuals isolated from the chaos of a collapsing external world. Sheltered (or trapped?) in an eerily beautiful salt mine are a mother (Tilda Swinton), father (Michael Shannon), son (George MacKay), their doctor (Lennie James), butler (Tim McInnerny), and friend (Bronagh Gallagher).

The inhabitants of the mine are themselves preserved in salt, a sort of hermetic stasis that forbids the incursion of the outside world. The mother’s hair remains artificially dark, and her 20-year-old son’s naivity and childishness is, at times, frankly disturbing. Then a strange girl (Moses Ingram) stumbles into the mine and into their midst, coaxing the inhabitants to confront the more difficult parts of themselves and of their history.

There is an air of menace and of unease that permeates the entire film, even when the characters are seemingly having a good time. A New Year’s Eve party starts with jollity and tap-dancing, and ends with the girl, dressed in the same bird costume that the mother’s (presumably dead) sister wore in the past, breaking down and crying about the fate of her lost family.

She turns to the mother as someone who abandoned her own relatives and looks for sympathy and forgiveness. Instead, the mother regurgitates her food onto her plate. There is a sense in which, although the girl is attempting to find some commonality and ask that the family confront themselves, she can never truly force them to turn inwards, to take responsibility for their decisions. Any step forwards they might make is rejected, their lives left unconfronted in their entirety.

At the heart of this abnegation of responsibility is the father, who, it turns out, must have been a petrochemicals giant in the old world. His son faithfully writes his father’s autobiography for no-one to read, no-one to enjoy apart from his father, as he glosses over or rewrites the harder, considerably less ethical parts. His son has clearly had his moral compass set by his father. In the diorama he builds, he shows those who suffered and died whilst building colonial infrastructure as delighted to be a part of the effort. In this vein, he reframes his father’s life, one which, it seems clear, has contributed to the ongoing apocalypse outside the mine.

Even when the son confronts this reality (“none of it’s true”), it feels as if nothing can change. Oppenheimer allows the characters to show how morally bankrupt they are, but in such a way that this doesn’t feel as condemnatory or as judgemental as it could. He also shows us that in this world they have created, they don’t really need to apologise or to change.

The musical aspect of the film feels out of place at times, but not in a particularly intentional way. The songs, however, are beautifully written and contribute both to the surreal and the uneasy sense of The End. The son manically dances, singing about themes that seem to echo those of the colonial "manifest destiny", the mother mourns her family, and a repeated line is the discomforting “drowning in light”.

This is a film that feels as though it will go on to win plaudits, but for me, there is something not fully cohesive about it as a whole (at 2.5 hrs it's also given itself a long time to not achieve this coherence). However, it feels like that lack of coherence, the unsettling emotional shifts and alteration of reality is the point, that the last survivors of a dead world can only exist caught in the aspic that will eventually kill them, or corrode their humanity as they live.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk