Another End

Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate.

Despite its initially familiar trajectory, Another End disarmingly and purposefully sweeps us away on a wave of apathy not unlike that which plagues its main character, challenging our sense of who we fundamentally are as humans.

You’re grateful for the time spent with a genuine epic of ideas and rueful that such heady themes weren’t more fully explored in a better film.

Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.

Another End knows that we’ll never stop trying to cheat death (or at least to deny it for as long as we can), but Messina’s film is so entranced by the dull flame of that desire that it fails to consider what it might illuminate about the darkness that surrounds it.

For a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

With Another End, Messina unites one of the most gifted actors of the last two decades with one of the most gifted of the last two years to venture into one of the most fertile territories of any creative practice, the questioning of life and death, body and soul, presence and absence. It is almost unbelievable to see it result in an apathetic exercise of low-fi sci-fi that drags its way toward an eye-rollingly predictable twist.