With The End, his debut fiction film, Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing (2012), and The Look of Silence (2014), a chilling diptych on the men responsible for mass killing in Indonesia, delivers something entirely unexpected: a blend of apocalyptic fable, family drama, and old-fashioned Hollywood musical. Twenty five years after environmental collapse has left Earth uninhabitable, a well-to-do family, identified only as Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon), and Son (George MacKay), dwell in an underground bunker, where they strive to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy. That is, however, until the arrival of a stranger, Girl (Moses Ingram), upends their routine. Son, a naïve twenty-something, is fascinated by the newcomer, and before long a potentially destabilising romance develops.

Notes by David O’Mahony.