Like EMILIA PÉREZ, THE END is a musical with, at first glance, no reason to be a musical as well as songs that aren’t particularly memorable. Unlike EMILIA PÉREZ, THE END winds up justifying its unusual genre choice. The stylisation and excess of the musical genre ends up contrasting with and emphasising the emotional repression at the core of the film.
THE END is a film that asks how the CEOs and shareholders of fossil fuel companies will sleep in their expensive bunkers after their capitalist extractivism and rapacious profiteering has destroyed the world. How does someone like Elon Musk or Donald Trump live with themselves? THE END posits the answer as denial and delusion: a genuine psychopathic belief that they were doing the right thing despite all evidence to the contrary combined with the ability to control the environment around them and manipulate the people closest to them.