This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Middleburg Film Festival. Unlike the Manhattan Short Film Festival that wasn’t traditional, Middleburg had all the normal film festival activities on a smaller scale than something like Sundance.
The Middleburg Film Festival was founded 12 years ago and has gained a lot of traction in recent years. This year, the festival showed 43 different films over 4 days and had different panels with directors and actors alike. A few notable ones were the panels featuring Colman Domingo, Zoe Saldana and director Steve McQueen.
I saw two films at the festival, “A Real Pain” directed by Jesse Eisenberg, and “The End” directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. Both were very good, but in this week’s blog, I will be reviewing The End.
The End is a very unique film, it is produced by the independent film company Neon and stars Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, Moses Ingram and George MacKay. It is an apocalyptic musical and has a runtime of around two and a half hours.
The film isn’t released yet and won’t be until December, so I won’t spoil the whole thing but I will tell you my initial thoughts.
The End is about a family who lives in a home/salt mine underground because the outside world is in the middle of the apocalypse. The film primarily focuses on the Son who has never known anything outside of the salt mine. He lives a normal enough life, feeding the fish, growing plants, helping his parents, until one day his life is changed once he meets a girl from the outside world.
The film starts abruptly and you aren’t entirely sure whether it is in fact a musical but don’t worry, it hits you. The first song is a bit jarring,but once it settles in you start to enjoy the music.
Not all the actors are classically trained singers and it is pretty apparent but I don’t think that takes away from the film itself.
Something interesting about this movie is that none of the characters have actual names, they are all referred to as Son, Mother, Father etc, which makes it difficult to understand who the characters are talking about.
The film itself was very enjoyable even though it has a pretty hefty runtime. The family dynamics are enthralling and you never can really tell when they are telling the truth.
As for the music, I think it is pretty difficult to describe. It feels like a mix of La La Land jazz and classical golden age musicals. The songs really didn’t have a direct correlation to what the characters were discussing but it adds to the disjointed apocalyptic feel of the whole movie.
My favorite part was the cinematography. The lighting was fantastic, it changed from warm to cool to match the songs and the characters and I thought it was very well executed. The set itself was also beautiful and well thought out.
On the whole I would recommend this movie to anyone looking for a new movie musical that is supposed to be a movie musical. It isn’t based on a stage production and it isn’t a book. It is an original and fresh idea that the film industry needs.
“The End” is entertaining, although slow occasionally, and will leave you thinking about it afterwards.
