Let’s say you owned an underground-bunker somewhere underneath Montrose: maybe beneath the Basin, the Links or even the Playhouse. How would you decide who to invite into the fallout-shelter with you when it’s time—when the world collapses? And could you defend that decision 20-years later to someone who suddenly pops in, out of the blue? The End” (MUBI), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, tries to break down these questions, without providing final answers.
I doubt that Montrose is flush with either underground-bunkers or people who can afford to build them, but, recalling the early stages of the COVID epidemic, while most of us (in the U.K. at least) were frantically stockpiling, panic buying, and forming “personal bubbles,” some wily “Preppers” had completed their preparations months earlier. And recently, when an IT outage blocked ATMs and inactivated retail card-payment machines across Montrose for several hours, it was those who had the hard cash who had no problems. Anecdotally, people seem more inclined to hold reserves at home these days, especially since two High Street cash-machines have recently been removed permanently.
Father, played by Michael Shannon, is one of those who is ready. He is proudly one of the 0.1%, an American making his fortune from oil-and-gas in Indonesia. Foretelling the world’s uninhabitability, and running away from unfavourable media scrutiny, he plunges into his custom-built underground-bunker with his art-collecting wife, Mother, played by Tilda Swinton. Less valuable members of the family are shunted aside in favour of infinitely more practical lodgers: a doctor, a butler, and a world-class chef. A curiously fragile Son, played by George MacKay, is born underground as sole heir to Father’s money and power. Into this prim environment drops Girl, played by Moses Ingram. Initially the family agree to “follow protocol” and either return her to the surface or kill her. But, in a rare moment of grace, they take pity on her: instead, they spare her life, with the unintended consequence that, one by one, the deep secrets kept by members of the bunker-community about their private pre-disaster lives are revealed. Mother’s initial disgust at the relationship between Son and Girl turns into resigned pragmatism, given the self-evident problem of a lack of other available mating-partners. As the walls in the catacombs around the living quarters begin to crumble, and cracks appear behind the paintings, tensions rise and resentments bubble up to the surface.
The story is similar to a recent post-apocalypse book-turned-Netflix-movie, “Leave the World Behind” (2023); but “The End” has a legitimate claim to be new, because, at least in part, it is a musical. The songs are not simply incidental—rather, they are used as a narrative device to reveal some important detail about the family, and are essential to the development of the plot. The segues (from spoken-dialog to sung-verse) work much better than I expected; the songs are quite good, helped along by faultlessly clear diction from the entire ensemble. The verses sung as 3- or 4-part harmony are reminiscent of a chorus-number closing an act of classic Italian opera. But the actors in “The End” do not appear to have received formal voice-training of the kind provided at a music college or conservatoire, so there is a naturalness and innocence to the songs which contrasts (intentionally?) with the spoken sequences elsewhere, in which the family are over-polite, stilted, walking on egg-shells.
To a person, the family are loathsome. Son’s main job is to ghost-write Father’s reputation-washing autobiography: the more he asks his dad for specifics—personal memories, examples of love—Father, begging for the forgiveness of the dead world above, desperately justifies his obscene mountains of wealth to himself. “Other companies were worse.” “Without fossil-fuels, the world would be languishing.” By the end of the film our stomachs have been turned by it all. Living underground, the days of glossy-magazine profiles and “rich lists” long gone, Father is revolting and pathetic. If anyone could be found to out-nasty Father, it must be Tilda Swinton’s Mother, who obsessively hangs and rearranges her art-collection so as to block the consciousness of her part in whatever horrors took place in Indonesia on Father’s watch. Or perhaps in Nigeria, where, as good white-saviours, they set up an orphanage. But her subconscious is loaded with guilt. Girl’s arrival is destabilising. Mother’s violent nightmares become more intrusive, and, as she unravels, the audience takes up almost a Biblical reference point: just as she became the god who choose which of her family should be rescued and which should be condemned, left behind to a certain death-sentence, now she is being judged, as at the Last Day.
The family impose regular military-style target-practice with guns and timed emergency-drills, they expect pristine art-gallery-style white-gloves to be worn before even touching any of the precious artefacts; they demand entertainment: aristocracy-style fancy-dress nights, with music and dancing, the costumes brought underground specially for future holidays. Most disturbing of all, the non-family members are subjected to frequent verbal-abuse on a whim, including, on one occasion, a homophobic slur (which doesn’t even merit an apology). It is more important to be polite to each other than loving or honest.
Returning home from the Playhouse, lines from a song early in the film rolled around in my mind (“A good life with no end in sight/Together our future is bright”). The context was a life of plenty, exclusivity, and safety in the cocoon underground. But surely these words apply just as well to the greed and hyper-consumption which caused the disaster in the first place. Father (rhetorically) asks, “What more could I have done?” Locating an answer to this question would be more fruitful than choosing a site for the bunker.
Adam Poole
12 April 2025
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