For his debut as a narrative artist, Joshua Oppenheimer devises a custom musical morality play in which survivors deep underground (and even deeper in denial) ponder their future.

With "The Act of Killing," director Joshua Oppenheimer took a radical, seemingly unthinkable approach to the documentary form, inviting his subjects — Indonesian gangsters who once served in the country's death squads — to reenact their crimes on camera. Why should his narrative debut be more conventional?

For “The End,” Oppenheimer conceives of a strange post-apocalyptic musical, set in an underground bunker where an elite group has been hoarding fine art and expensive wines for a catastrophe that, perversely, may have been of their own making. Oppenheimer got the idea from a documentary he was developing about a “very rich, very dangerous family” (in his own words), but ultimately chose to take the project in a very different direction.

With its bloated 148-minute running time and stubborn lack of compelling conflict, “The End” doesn’t play to mainstream sensibilities. Instead, Oppenheimer appeals to arthouse audiences with an earnest rumination on guilt and the human capacity to rationalize away one’s crimes. The filmmaker conceived the project before the COVID-19 pandemic, but somehow neglected to consider that audiences have grown tired of claustrophobic stories about being locked up.