Waiting for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud to start, I wondered how much time I’d spent over the years watching his signature warehouses, offices and apartments. The man loves a purpose-built soundstage set, the drabber the better but counterintuitively showcased under unrepentantly artificial lighting—one rung down from “Lynchian” in terms of overt ominousness but similarly ready to radiate menace. Those sets’ simplicity offsets his films’ often elevated eccentricity levels, though by Kurosawa’s standards Cloud is comparatively sedate insofar as it has a fully explicable plot: Online reseller Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) offloads one too many shoddy knockoff goods, attracting the ire of ripped-off customers who band together to take disproportionately bloody revenge. Kurosawa divides this 123-minute work into two very differently paced rise-and-fall halves. The first compresses weeks or months as Yoshii flips enough to goods to move to the country and buy a cheap house, complete with storage area, where he plans to live with longtime girlfriend/transparent (to us, not him) femme fatale Akiko (Kotone Furukawa). Their rise to tentative wealth is idiosyncratically signaled when she goes from preparing coffee using a manual hand bean-grinder to attempting to use an espresso machine that, since it’s expensive, should be an upgrade but in practice just doesn’t work. (Just like infinite-exponential-curve capitalism!) The second half is essentially an hour-long setpiece in which ripped-off strangers assemble to kidnap and torture Yoshii to death, but their revenge predictably is complicated; standoffs and reversals ensue.

The sound mix elevates the humming of Yoshii’s computer monitor, as if the digitally transmitted virus of Pulse were still going strong years later. The inexplicable proliferation of evil is often Kurosawa’s beat, which can help explain the derangement exhibited by Yoshii’s enemies, a portrayal of capitalism’s deleterious effects as ethics-overriding brainworms. Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless one of Kurosawa’s goofier outings, full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic. That all of this is in service of a peculiar but total vision of cinema is undeniable even if the connective links might not be obvious to the viewer. No less than Pedro Costa claiming he only wants to make a movie fractionally as good as a Lubitsch film, Kurosawa saying that his sense of offscreen sense is directly descended from the Lumière brothers is a very-him move, a personal sense of secret connections throughout film history.

Joshua Oppenheimer takes a different approach to interiors in The End, a long-gestating passion project whose biggest asset is the enormous compound it takes place within—imagine the interior and exterior of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but quintupled in size and stuffed within a bunker. This very cool super-size set houses the last family on earth: oil tycoon father (Michael Shannon), art-fixated mother (Tilda Swinton) and their oddly infantile adult son (George Mackay). Inspired in part by a viewing of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The End’s big gambit is that it’s not just an allegory about reckoning with the guilt of being responsible for climate change but a musical allegory, whose 13 songs have lyrics written by Oppenheimer. The Act of Killing had a few songs as well, part of a barrage of techniques used to successfully burrow under the skin of Indonesian military officers culpable for mass killings; here, the songs’ function is more straightforward. Once you get past the initial oddity of the idea, it seems pretty clear that the intent here isn’t to be offbeat as such. Oppenheimer seems to sincerely believe that songs are the best way to articulate the interiors of characters who toggle from hollow, flagrantly allegorical constructs to people worrying about complex interpersonal relationships; neither side of each such characterization seems to be talking to the other. While I wouldn’t be the target audience for the music under any circumstances (contemporary Broadway is kryptonite to me), it doesn’t help that, since Les Miserables has normalized the formerly frowned-upon practice of having actors sing all their songs no matter how unsuited they are to the task, The End takes almost no time to send its cast out to roughly sing out their interiorities. 

Shannon is credited as “Father” but might as well be “The White Man Who Rules The World For All the Other Patriarchs.” This self-deluding figure homeschools his child with propaganda about how, as a corporate head, he really did care about saving the planet; over the lengthy running time, dad comes to understand he has something to answer for. But when it comes to climate change, I’m interested in nihilism, grief, realpolitik solutions and not much more; belated accountability exercises, even metaphorical ones regarding the collective complicity I need to own every time I fly or eat unsustainable meat, do not strike me as an interesting proposition, let alone the possibility of redemption. (Send them to the Hague and be done with it.) There are moments of black comedy (intended?), feints at camp (same question), shambolic fake-it-til-you-make-it dancing (Mackay gives windmill arms his all) credited to two choreographers and dialogue that’s just plain odd, as when Mackay calls a fish a cocksucker. These tonal disjunctures seem less strategic than like a lack of control, possibly resulting from a mountain of material generated from a variety of strategies; at 148 minutes, the film feels carved out of many more. The questions that I ended up contemplating are probably not those The End wanted me to focus on; e.g., if thousands of lives depended on it, could Tilda Swinton play a normal person at this point, or are the once-chameleonic performer’s recognizable tics so unlearnable as to place her somewhere near late-period Christopher Walken? 

There’s an uneasy racialized dimension as well. The family is all white, though their household includes a Black doctor (Lennie James) who’s theoretically an equal peer, but whose frequent abrasiveness seems to be deployed as a tool to obtain the respect he otherwise lacks. (His eruptions of hostility, sometimes crudely sexual, seem to speak to an entire character arc or two lost somewhere along the way.) But the family’s complacency and myopic view of their own lack of guilt is only truly shaken when an intruder (Moses Ingram) seeking shelter, the first outsider in 20 years, breaks in. First they try to kill her, then let her stay; the fact that she’s a Black woman being chased by an all-white family with guns who tell her—once they’re done with the homicidal portion—that she can now relax articulates its own subtext. That tension is heightened because the film sometimes appears to be a mid-aughts-style assembly of Things White People Like (bespoke pajamas, dressing up in barbershop quartet outfits, homophobia). The stranger’s accepted—first by Mackay’s baby-faced son, eventually by everyone else—and the takeaway seems to be the recently popular Twitter slogan, “Listen to Black women.” Nothing wrong with that, unless I guess you wanted to counter-balance it with the equally popular “It’s not her job to educate you” line; in either case, the white guilt that apparently needs to be assuaged here creates queasy, underthought dynamics.