Watching Joshua Oppenheier’s musical The End for New Scientist, 14 May 2025

Life on the planet’s surface has become nigh-on unbearable, but with money and resources enough, the finest feelings and highest aspirations of our culture can be perpetuated underground, albeit for only a chosen few. Michael Shannon plays an oil magnate who years ago brought his family to safety in an old mine. Here he rewrites his and his company’s history in a self-serving memoir dictated to his grown-up but critically inexperienced son (George Mackay; I last encountered him in The Beast, which I reviewed for New Scientist) while his wife, the boy’s mother, played by Tilda Swinton, curates an art collection somehow (and perhaps best not ask how) purloined from the great collections of the world.

The mine — an actual working salt mine in Patralia Soprana, Sicily — is simultaneously a place of wonder and constriction. You can walk out of the bunker and wander around its galleries, singing as you go (did I mention this was a musical?), but were you to hike outside the mine, I don’t fancy your chances. It’s a premise familiar from any number of post-apocalyptic narratives, from Return to the Planet of the Apes (1975) to last year’s streaming hit Fallout.

When a rare surface-dweller (Moses Ingram) stumbles on their home, it looks as though she’ll be expelled, and more likely killed, to keep this shangri-la a secret. But at the last moment the Boy cries, “I don’t want to do this!”

It turns out nobody else wants to, either, not even the Mother, who’s the most terrified of the bunch.

Clumsily, over two and a half hours, the family draw this stranger into their bubble of comforting lies. (The End is too long, but you could lay the same charge at most of the musicals on which it’s modelled — have you tried sitting through Oklahoma! recently?)

Lies — this is the film’s shocking premise — are necessary. Lies stand between us and despair. They create the bubbles in which kindness, generosity and love can be grown. Like the golden-age musicals of the 1950s to which it plays musical homage, The End tells an optimistic tale.

The young visitor resists assimilation at first, because she can’t forgive herself for abandoning her own family on the surface. Living as if she belonged to this new family would be to let herself off the hook for what she did to the old one.

Worn down by the young woman’s honesty, the family reveals its complicity in the end of the world. The father’s industry set fire to the sky. The mother finally admits she wants the planet’s surface to be uninhabitable because if it isn’t, the family she abandoned there might still be alive and suffering. The mother’s best friend, her son’s confident, played by Bronagh Gallagher, sacrificed her own child years ago to ensure her own survival.

But then, bit by bit, song by song, this wounded and reconfigured family sews itself a new cocoon of lies and silences, taboos and songs (the songs are accomplished and astonishing), all to make life not just bearable, but possible. Of course the stranger ends up absorbed in this effort. Of course she ends up singing along to the same song. Wouldn’t you, in time?

Whoever these people used to be, and however you much you point accusing fingers at their past, the fact is that these are all good people, singing their way back into the delusion they need to keep going, day after subterranean day.

True, the lies we tell today tell us tomorrow. But this unlikely, left-field, musical — my tentative pick for best SF movie of 2025 — is prepared to forgive its compromised characters. We can only get through life by lying about it, so is it any wonder we make mistakes? Should the worst come to the worst, we should at least be permitted to go down singing.