The always eminently watchable Rebecca Hall (The Man I Love, TV’s The Beauty) both anchors and buoys the tonally irregular but consistently thoughtful and compelling sci-fi comedy-drama The End of It, a feature debut for Catalan writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona.
Offering a near future that’s creepily plausible, resonant with recent headlines and nicely underplayed in terms of design, this posits Hall as Claire, a 250-year-old artist who’s kept looking like an elegant 30something thanks to sophisticated blood dialysis techniques and other kinds of high-tech, vaguely defined wizardry, available to a very select few.
The End of It
The Bottom Line
Augurs a potentially interesting career.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Gael Garcia Bernal, Noomi Rapace, Beanie Feldstein
Director/screenwriter: Maria Martinez Bayona
2 hours 22 minutes
However, when Claire grows bored with an effectively immortal life and chooses to die, her husband Diego (Gael García Bernal), 180-year-old daughter Martha (Noomi Rapace), and android personal assistant Sarah (Beanie Feldstein) react in various ways, ranging from supportive to angry. Running an attenuated 142-minutes, this feels slightly flawed by a script that doesn’t quite know how to play out its endgame and erupts with jarring flashes of spongey, overegged satire. Still, the performances and visuals consistently add value, and if this doesn’t sell many tickets IRL, it should haul in clicks as a streaming entity.
Shot mostly in the Canary Islands with the region’s searing, glaring Tropic-of-Cancer-adjacent light, freakishly black, volcanic soil and groovy mid-century-modernist buildings, the film suggests a future where the worst climactic disasters have been avoided. That, or the people we meet here are wealthy enough to have found a cushy little enclave to live forever without a care in the world. It seems they’re part of the select few, members of a vaguely alluded-to world order that provides the means to exist in a state of permanent, hedonistic ennui.
But the only way to get in on this immortality gig, or to be granted permission to have a baby, is for someone else to die. And since no one expires from, say, cancer or other now-curable diseases, and bones and organs can be replaced like car parts with artificial spares, people only pass when involved in freak accidents…or take their own lives.
On the occasion of her 250th birthday (she gets a cake with so many candles she can barely be bothered to blow them out), Claire is in a funk and just not enjoying any of this anymore. Having just replaced her last remaining natural bone, she takes stock. Years ago, she was an acclaimed artist whose work was a bit avant-garde and challenging. Now she designs jewelry, a remunerative but not very intellectually rewarding pursuit. (This plot point is a bit mean to jewelry designers.) Suffering an acute case of anhedonia, she decides that she will no longer have her blood work every day or any other kind of life-extending treatment and instead will just let nature take its course.
As grey hairs appear and other augurs of age become visible, Claire contends with the varied reactions of her small social circle. She couldn’t care less about the assorted colorful acquaintances who attended her birthday party, a cohort clad in an assortment of semi-minimalist clothes with funky little details and interestingly textured textiles, as if dressed in a mix of Comme des Garçons and Cos. (Costume designer Pau Auli’s work throughout is both witty and oddly covetable with its precise tailoring and subtle color palette.)
But it is more upsetting that Diego, her husband of many years, doesn’t get her reasoning at all, or even sees this as a personal rejection. Sarah, Claire’s relentlessly perky robot sidekick, similarly cannot compute why Claire would wish to undermine Sarah’s prime directive, to keep Claire alive. But she’ll do whatever it takes to keep her mistress happy, like some kind of humanoid golden retriever.
Only her daughter Martha, who shows up suddenly, having not seen her mother in 50 years, seems at peace with Claire’s decision. That turns out to be because she thinks this may be her chance to take Claire’s place as a breeding female in their society and has brought along an android baby to practice on, like some kind of 23rd century Tamagotchi that can be switched off and recharged whenever necessary.
Prone to wearing clothes that suggest an overgrown pre-teen herself, all frills, flounces and bright colors, Martha doesn’t look like great maternal material to Claire, although this judgmental attitude may be evidence of her own maternal deficiencies. The peevish sparring between the two of them gets a comic push from the fact that the two actors are very close in age (Hall is three years younger than Rapace), but like so many parents and children they remain stuck in a dynamic that formed sometime in adolescence and has never been outgrown.
The digs at the pretensions of artists, channeled through Claire’s decision to make her death a public spectacle in order to secure some future fame, are less amusing here because the blows never seem to quite connect with their targets. Also, one begins to suspect that a small budget prohibited the filmmakers from showing a wider view of this society, which also dampens any parodic purpose. Claire’s elective death therefore remains a problematic choice for some viewers, an act of vainglorious selfishness from a woman who was never terribly nice to begin with.
It’s lucky she’s played by Hall, who endows Claire with a spiky sort of wit and charisma, while her performance in the film’s final minutes packs a considerable emotional wallop and pathos to spare. The impact of that shocking final scene is sufficient to send viewers out feeling enervated after what’s been a pretty desultory final act. But even with these flaws, The End of It looks like it marks the beginning of an interesting career for its young writer-director, a talent with a strong visual sensibility and skills with actors.
