‘The End of Us’ (SXSW review)

Nick (Ben Coleman) is an aspiring actor/musician & Leah (Ali Vingiano) is a non-specific business person. As far as couples go they are generally unspectacular and very early into the film, they break up.

Then the stay at home order hits. The challenges of a broken up couple forced to live together during a pandemic are substantial.

This film deals with them in a real way.

I think that’s the major issue I have with this film and it may be my issue.

As someone who still hasn’t completed their vaccination cycle and has been more or less quarantined for over a year I don’t really want to see an accurate portrayal of the collective trauma this country and the world has faced. 540,000 Americans are dead.

I’ve had to attend funerals and celebrations via Zoom and going to the grocery store means literally taking my life into my hands because of the anti-mask anti-science crowd in the area I reside.

The mother of one of my closest friends is currently hospitalized with COVID and I am incredibly worried for them both.

There is no distance from the pandemic and it made it really hard to enjoy this film.

Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner are good writers. The dialogue is natural. There is a solid pace and while the story is reasonably predictable it’s not trite or cliche. The character development is solid and while the couple is flawed the flaws are human and real and the dynamic is believable.  Too real and too believable maybe.

The unemployment rate peaked close to 15% in April 2020 and was close to 40% in the leisure and hospitality industry. Things have dropped back to normal across all industries but the L & H unemployment rate is still well over 15%. Do I want to see entertainment that reminds me of this? I really don’t. It’s literally still going on.

Kanter and Loevner tell a complete breakup story. They show us how hard COVID isolation is. They paint the picture of fatigue, loneliness and despair that have permeated the last 13+ months for a lot of people.  Everyone I’ve talked to has some sort of COVID fatigue that makes us want to rip our masks off and go wherever we want and do whatever we want. Nick & Leah are no different, at points in the film, their COVID fatigue becomes acute and some bad decisions are made.  The narrative arc is totally understandable because I think the majority of the population are feeling similarly in some way or other.

The film is pretty solid from a technical perspective. I think the production values are pretty good, but there are some suspect lighting choices at times and I think this has more to do with budgetary constraints for a small film than any lack of technical know-how. There is one sight gag that’s a bit ham handed and it was so obvious the filmmakers were going there that I literally groaned when it happened.

The movie resolves eventually even though COVID has not and puts punctuation on a story that has a real beginning, middle and end. However I don’t know if I was satisfied by the end or just relieved this testament to our collective trauma was over.

As I was writing this I did some research into the art of the Spanish Flu era to see if I could put this film into context and it really didn’t go very well. Klimt died of a stroke likely caused by the flu. His mentee Egon Schiele died of the flu. Norwegian Dadaist Edvard Munch was quoted as saying, “Illness, insanity, and death kept watch over my cradle and accompanied all of my life.” Trying to make sense of this film through some research really just added to my confusion of art produced during pandemic times.

It honestly may have been too soon for a film like this.  Maybe we will look back in ten years and say, The End of Us was the first true art film of the COVID era and it’s genius will be revealed then. I don’t really know, but I don’t think so. I think it was a fairly pedestrian, if mildly interesting story that hit very close to home at a time when all of us are basically confined in our homes. That’s not a real recipe for success.

2 out of 5 stars