The End review – end of the world singalong drama commands attention

There are very good performances from Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton, who go to ground in a survival bunker with their son, only to come across an uninvited guest

The end of the world is usually only thought about with horror. But Joshua Oppenheimer’s unearthly musical drama, set in a fossil-fuel oligarch’s luxury survival bunker, replaces that with something even worse: sadness. And then something even more wrenchingly unbearable; not hope exactly, but a strange sense that it might not be the end, but an evolutionary transitional stage to something else, something unknowable, something that makes humanity’s current state even tinier than simple annihilation.

Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton play the last super-rich couple in the world. He is a breezily self-assured energy magnate and she a former ballerina. After an environmental catastrophe 25 years ago, they retreated from civil disorder, deep underground into an eerily well-appointed suite of rooms with food, air and medicines in which they keep their colossal fine art collection. Their only son (George MacKay) busies himself creating a twee diorama of a quaintly imagined American landscape, and assisting his father with his self-serving autobiography that no one will read – in which he absolves himself of any blame for the climate crisis.