The End
A 16-minute stop-motion film about death at an airport. World premiere: May 22, 2026, Cannes Film Festival.
What happens in The End — and why an airport is the perfect setting for it
The End takes place in a single airport terminal where multiple catastrophes unfold simultaneously. An airplane in distress can't reach the control tower because the pig employees manning it are too absorbed in reality television to answer. Down in the duty-free zone, a slug-like salesman aggressively hawks products that feel morally compromised. A dolphin barista is having a breakdown behind the espresso machine. Mole-like inspectors are interrogating a suspicious fly in what reads like an absurdist fever dream. And somewhere at the margins of all this noise, a mysterious figure moves with quiet, ominous purpose.
The thing nobody mentions about airports is how they're already primed for catastrophe — everyone's anxious, nobody's listening, authority figures are distracted. Swedish filmmaker Niki Lindroth von Bahr uses that anxiety as scaffolding. This isn't a story about a plane crash. It's about how a plane crash happens while the world watches reality TV.
Co-written with American playwright Jen Silverman (whose stage work includes The Moors and Collective Rage), the film packs overlapping storylines and escalating stakes into 15 minutes. That's tight. The voice cast — Noomi Rapace, Alexander Skarsgård, Denis Lavant, Tuva Novotny, and Kevin Rowland (yes, the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman) — communicates enormous amounts of subtext without visible faces to rely on. Skarsgård especially is capable of doing more with tone than most actors manage with a full scene.
Who made The End, and how a Swedish animator became the festival circuit's most unsettling voice
Lindroth von Bahr isn't new to this. Her earlier stop-motion shorts — Bath House (2014) and the feature The Burden (2017) — established her as someone who treats animation as a vehicle for genuine unease, not family-friendly whimsy. The End marks her world premiere at Cannes 2026, where it competes for the Short Film Palme d'Or.
The film is a Sweden–France–Denmark co-production. Malade AB, Les Valseurs, and Wired Fly collaborated on what genuinely feels like a pan-European sensibility. New Europe Film Sales is handling international distribution — which means festival-first strategy. Streaming will follow, but on the distributor's timeline.
Here's what makes the stop-motion texture matter: it's not just aesthetics. The slight imperfection of each frame, the tactile weight of the puppets, the way light falls on felt — all of it creates physical presence that CGI can't replicate. And when your subject is death, presence is everything. The film doesn't treat mortality as an abstraction. It puts it in a duty-free shop. It puts it behind a counter where nobody's answering.
The screenplay works because Silverman brought a dramatist's instinct for escalation. The dolphin barista having a breakdown is funny on paper. In context, it's closer to a panic attack rendered in wire and felt. That tension between the absurd and the genuinely frightening is where Lindroth von Bahr does her best work.
Where to watch The End right now
The film hasn't had a general release yet. It premiered at Cannes on May 22, 2026, in competition. As of this writing, no theatrical or streaming date has been publicly announced.
Here's what's actually happening: prestigious short films typically follow a festival window before moving to platforms. Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker updates as soon as distribution rights are confirmed — worth bookmarking if you're planning to hunt it down. The film may land on a curated short-film platform first (the kind that bundles festival winners), then eventually move to major services like Netflix or MUBI.
Check back here or on Movie OTT once awards season winds down. That's usually when short films get their streaming homes locked in.
What you should know before watching
Runtime: 15–16 minutes.
Tone: Dark comedy with existential dread. Not family-friendly. Think Wes Anderson meets absurdist theater — visually playful, narratively grim.
If you liked: Lindroth von Bahr's own The Burden, or experimental animation like Anomalisa or Loving Vincent, this is essential. If you appreciate voice acting as performance art (think BoJack Horseman level of subtext), you'll connect with this.
Fair warning: The film doesn't resolve all its threads in 15 minutes. That might be intentional. Incompletion could be the whole point.
Why this film matters — and who should actually watch it
The End is not a film for everyone. Sixteen minutes. Stop-motion animals. An airport in crisis. Death, somewhere at the margins. It's unsettling and won't hand you closure. But if you have any appetite for animation that treats its audience as adults capable of sitting with ambiguity — and if you're curious what Skarsgård and Rapace sound like voicing anthropomorphic catastrophe — this is the kind of film that lingers. Short films rarely get casts or collaborators at this caliber. Don't sleep on it.
The film's 0/10 rating is a placeholder (it's too new for aggregated scores). Award wins from Cannes and subsequent festivals will update that number — and frankly, prestige festival shorts often score based on critical consensus rather than audience votes anyway. Worth tracking as the festival circuit plays out.
