THE END OF TIME

Writers: Alexandra Gill, Peter Mettler.
Director: Peter Mettler

Rating: 2.5/5

Toronto native Peter Mettler endeavours to define the unity of experience in The End of Time, a bewildering non-linear barrage of sound and image that is more than happy to leave its festival followers scratching their collective head. Sped-up clouds, bubbling lava, dead grasshoppers and the directors’’s mother are just a handful of the stunningly captured but seemingly abstract images Mettler utilises to convey the interwoven tapestry of time and its relationship to our existence. And if “unity of experience” and “interwoven tapestry of…existence” struck you as a tad pretentious…well, this film may not be for you.

Mettler’s approach to his brand of ‘sensory cinema’ was honed in previous works like Picture of Light, a filmic study of the Aurora Borealis, and the provocatively titled Gambling, God and LSD (three letters that sprung to mind on a few occasions while watching his latest).  The End of Time literally launches itself into our world, with an opening sequence that chronicles the 1960 space-jump of US parachutist Joseph Kitinger, the Army Colonel threw himself earthward from 30 kilometres high.

From this point, the director takes us to the Large Hadron Collider underground facility in Geneva, perhaps as a symbolic gesture indicating the story he is going to present is about mankind and the natural world at its most primal, molecular level (or not). At different junctures, we are taken to the lava flows of Hawaii, a public funeral parade and cremation in India, an ant colony’s transportation of a large dead cricket and the crumbling metropolis of Detroit.

Each is captured with the most dazzling technical skill. Mettler, one of Canada’s most respected cinematographers, leaves no technique on the table in his coverage of a myriad of tableaus. The final 20 minutes, in which he embraces giddying effects that recall Kubrick’s trippy ‘space-journey’ in 2001 A Space Odyssey and Douglas Trumbull’s visions of the afterlife in Brainstorm, the results are truly mesmerising, occasionally even invoking a form of motion sickness.

Yet the questions arises, ‘Is The End of Time less a motion picture and more an art installation?’ Mettler asks so much of his audience, both in terms of interpretive skill and downright tolerance, one begins to wonder just what point is worth the patience required to sit through this extraordinarily original but frustratingly obtuse exercise. Without contextualising the author’s intent within the boundaries of a themed exhibition, The End of Time will prove largely impenetrable for even the hard-core avant-garde aficionado.

Not for one second should Mettler’s skilled method be doubted, nor the passion of his vision. But if his intent was to paint a portrait, however kaleidoscopic, of how the passage of time affects mankind as one, he may have chosen an aesthetic that doesn’t alienate the vast majority. In painting such a densely existential picture of us all, he ultimately engages no one.