10 Recent Movies NOBODY Saw Coming
3. The End
The natural next step in the career of feted documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer - best known for his searing docs The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence - was clearly to direct a 2.5-hour post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, right?
Truly, Oppenheimer couldn't have chosen a more left-field project for his narrative feature debut, and evidently nobody was quite prepared for what The End would be when it played the festival circuit late last year.
At once fascinatingly bold and infuriatingly slow-moving, The End follows a family residing in an underground bunker 20 years after the world has effectively ended, seemingly by their own doing. The result is 148 minutes of squabbling, existential musings, and many your-mileage-may-vary songs, given the relatively uneven quality of the singing on offer.
The End is, despite its polarising nature, absolutely one of the strangest and most surprising releases of the last year, and per its marvellous production design clearly wasn't made on the cheap. And so again, you have to wonder how anyone involved with bankrolling it expected to make their money back.