Despite an intriguing sci-fi premise, Maria Martínez Bayona’s feature debut is a tonally mismatched and unintentionally comedic slog.
As tradition dictates, two hundred and fifty candles engulf Claire Fort’s (Rebecca Hall) birthday cake. With two and a half centuries behind her she belongs to the first generation granted immortality in an apparent utopia, provided they adhere to a relentless anti-ageing regimen and avoid any harm that might leave them beyond repair. Though her irksome friends retain their buoyant gratitude for perpetual existence, Claire’s mindset begins to shift as the prospect of eternity slowly drains her life of its lustre. So, as she blows out the flickering flames, she wishes for just one thing: to finally die.
Mere hours before the party held in her honour, Claire breaks the last natural bone in her body and has it replaced. The singular rib is returned to her in a vacuum-sealed bag, and with it, the final trace of her organic self is gone. Now composed of a wholly synthetic foundation, she is left to ponder how human she can truly be anymore. After news of her impending death spreads far and wide, she is approached to curate a retrospective of her bygone creations as an artist, which ironically once fixated on the flesh and blood of the human body.
In a seaside shack she sifts through her portfolio of work, including her own skeleton bound together with wire. She slips the final rib into its slot and, during the unnerving act of observing her own complete remains, the realization dawns on Claire that perhaps her death, too, could be art. In the days leading up to her self-execution, she navigates a slew of publicity stunts and grounded moments that make you wonder whether she might still decide life is worth living.
In her feature film debut, writer-director Maria Martínez Bayona does little more than recycle familiar science fiction and dystopian tropes, resulting in a project that blends the shortcomings of Black Mirror with the indulgent iconography from The Substance (think nails ripped from their beds and sparse grey hairs clinging to a scalp for dear life). It certainly proves no more effective than the latter in its commentary on contemporary resistance to natural ageing, circling the same ideas without any further contribution.
The writing largely avoids building any mythology around how this society came to be, and while generic, it remains comprehensible until it begins to take increasingly incongruent swings. From a church scene featuring a child pastor who instructs his congregants to “refresh and regress”, while placing magenta gummy bears into their open mouths like communion wafers, to the anti-climactic grand finale that evokes all the earnestness of an 18th-century public hanging filtered through the aesthetics of a K-pop concert (lightsticks included). Aside from a small number of well-judged gags that land as intended, watching the film unfold induces a severe case of tonal whiplash.
Even with a cast as respectable as the one assembled here, every performance feels staggeringly artificial, without a stroke of intention. Rebecca Hall struggles to muster chemistry with any of her scene partners, in part due to the material she’s given, but also because Claire feels ultimately one-dimensional despite having several lifetimes’ worth of experiences. Across scenes with her brooding daughter Martha (Noomi Rapace), her heinously horny husband Diego (Gael García Bernal) and her nagging robot housekeeper turned life coach Sarah (Beanie Feldstein), not a single relationship bears a genuine emotional through line.
Ultimately, The End Of It appears to hallucinate its own perceptiveness, assuming that the it’s over reliance on conceptual posturing would effectively double as contemplation on the value of life. The entire premise requires the audience to invest in Claire’s fate, but by rendering her a consistently emotionally distant and largely unlikable figure, it shoots itself in the foot and hobbles around relying on goodwill it does little to earn.