With “The Act of Killing,” director Joshua Oppenheimer approached the documentary form in a radical, seemingly unthinkable way, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who had once served on the country’s death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera. Why should his narrative debut be any more conventional?
For “The End,” Oppenheimer conceives a peculiar post-apocalyptic musical, confined to an underground bunker where an elite set of people have hoarded fine art and expensive wines for a cataclysm that, perversely enough, they may well have instigated. Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about a “very wealthy, very dangerous family” (in his words), but ultimately
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