Tilda Swinton stated at her SXSW keynote last weekend that she would be headed to Dublin after leaving the festival in Austin to begin production on The End.
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), and co-written by Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair), The End is the documentary filmmaker’s first fictional film. Oppenheimer has described the film as “an exploration of whether we as human beings can come to a place where our guilt is too much to recover from our pasts”, a theme which he says grew out of subjects he explored in his documentary The Act of Killing.
The End is a musical about a wealthy family surviving in a bunker, two decades after the world has ended. The film follows a mother, father, and their twenty-year-old son, who was born in the bunker and has never seen the outside world. They struggle to repress the guilt they feel for leaving loved ones behind, and the father’s contribution to the world ending as an oil tycoon. The music is inspired by Broadway music of the 1940s and 1950s.
The idea for the film came to Oppenheimer when researching wealthy families with the intention of rounding off The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence into a trilogy of films set in Indonesia about power. During this time, Oppenheimer heard about a family buying a doomsday bunker that was more like a palace than a bunker.
Tilda Swinton (The Souvenir, Memoria) and George MacKay (1917, Captain Fantastic) are the only cast members announced so far. The End is produced by Neon and co-produced by Wild Atlantic Pictures, with co-production support funding from Eurimages and support from Det Danske Filminstitut, Film und Medien Stiftung NRW, and Match Factory Productions. The film is also produced by Oppenheimer and Signe Byrge Sørensen (Our Memory Belongs to Us).
The End is expected to release in 2024.