No one makes spiraling look quite like possession the way Rebecca Hall does. Whenever she’s allowed to be unhinged, it never feels as though her outbursts are uncalculated. There’s a precise madness that lurks in her eyes, where she’s driven, not by the unpredictability of emotion, but by an outside spirit of sorts. First-time feature director Maria Martínez Bayona understands the power of her lead actress, and the film “The End of It” wisely anchors itself in Hall’s wild performance.
The sci-fi around Hall may not be as fully developed as it could be, but looked at differently, these simple characterizations and economical world-building can be read as a feature, not a bug. Bayona has crafted a parable that cuts directly to society’s obsession with the connection among aging, self-worth, beauty and art, and it’s best we course-correct now before the consequences become irreversible.
Hall plays Claire, an artist who lives in a world where aging has been cured, and people can choose to live forever if they want to. Blood cleanses (goodbye, Creatin), bone replacement surgeries, an automated synthetic assistant and a steady supply of medicine ensure that people can live forever. When we meet Claire, she’s celebrating her 250th birthday, where she simply couldn’t look unhappier to be alive. An interaction in the kitchen acts as humorous foreshadowing for a show-stopping monologue later, wherein Claire has a chat (or rather is interrogated by) a young girl at her birthday party. The girl asks what Claire will be doing for her subsequent birthdays, which breaks Claire. You can imagine her envisioning what another 250 years of celebrations would look like, surrounded by fake friends, saccharine food and conversations that go nowhere.
When it comes time to blow out her candles, she articulates her wish to die. It comes as a shock to her party guests and her husband, Diego (Gael García Bernal), who can’t imagine why she’d want to give up their life. Bayona blocks this revelation playfully, making the scene feel more like something out of a cult gathering than a celebration due to the deployment of flickering candles and having Claire’s guests nervously laugh at increasingly higher decibels once they grapple with the gravitas of her confession.
After Claire’s decision, her exhibitors, ever eager to exploit her life to make a profit, suggest she transform the day of her death into an act of spectacle. There’s a timer that counts down the days till Claire’s death, and people are encouraged to observe as she weans off of all that has made her immortal. The rest of the film then becomes a way for her to get her affairs in order, which involves everything from rekindling her sense of artistic identity to making amends with her 150-year-old daughter, Sarah (Noomi Rapace). As the film marches towards its inevitable conclusion, Bayona’s film can ironically feel like it’s just killing time, mistaking world-building for a compelling narrative. I’ve also grown weary of dystopian stories that center on the ultra-wealthy, and Bayona’s film certainly could have been more interesting if it focused on characters for whom these life extension treatments weren’t readily available.
But the ideas that Bayona explores are worth the tedious execution, if only because these questions feel all the more compelling when embodied by a performer like Hall. We can all relate to wanting more time, but when does that pursuit get in the way of living a life fully lived? Do limitations and finitude give life its meaning? Are things only beautiful because they have an expiration date? Hall’s relationship with her daughter is a fascinating one, as we see that the grudges they hold towards each other have gone on for over a century. It’s hard to think of beefing with someone for that long, and Bayona seems curious about the impact of time on conflict as well. Without death, in theory, people can fester for as long as they live, and time can only heal all wounds if you believe you have life to live for after. Living forever means the persistence of habits, with none of the clarity of change that can often accompany a brush with mortality.
It’s not that Bayona’s film is pro-death, though. She seems to earnestly be grappling with what it means to steward our time well and to assuage the temptation to believe that just because we have more of it, we would spend it well. It might have been too on the nose–and perhaps society in an ageless future has moved beyond the need for pop music from One Direction and Taylor Swift, but lyrics from Zayn and Swift’s duet aptly titled “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” conjured in my mind while watching Bayona’s colorfully morbid film: “I don’t wanna live forever / ‘Cause I know I’ll be living in vain.”
Living is harder than dying, but when perhaps knowing that it all comes to an end, that the time we have is limited, precious, yet ultimately ours, is a way to give life its true meaning.
