A little song and dance with your post-apocalypse? Winnipeg Free Press [Video]

Part end-of-days fairy tale, part family drama and, most unexpectedly, part song-and-dance musical, this debut dramatic feature from American-born, Denmark-based filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer is vexatiously long, tonally wacky and musically uneven.

And yet, and yet…

Even if the film can sometimes feel like a failure, it’s an idiosyncratic, original failure, and its vision of a post-apocalyptic world is haunted and haunting. Like all Oppenheimer’s work — he made his name as a radically experimental documentarian — The End ends up as a mysterious and moving treatise on the elusiveness of truth and the lure of self-deception.

The gorgeously claustrophobic story takes place in a bunker built deep in a former salt mine. More than two decades after a global climate catastrophe killed almost everyone else on the planet, an ultrawealthy family, identified only as Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon) and Son (George MacKay), live in this luxury hidey-hole with their retainers, Butler (Tim McInnerny), Doctor …