Maria Martínez Bayona's 'The End of It' Satirizes Immortality and Art at Cannes

Spanish director Maria Martínez Bayona's debut feature 'The End of It' premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which concluded on Sunday. The sci-fi comedy envisions a future where medical advances make death obsolete, following 250-year-old artist Claire (Rebecca Hall) who plans her suicide as a performance art piece. Claire, whose body has been entirely replaced with synthetic parts, builds a skeleton from her removed bones in her studio. She rejects the anti-aging regimen and stages a performance in a brutalist church, where a giant red gummy bear altar promotes rejuvenation. The film critiques the anti-aging industry and the capitalist art world, where Claire's final performance is co-opted by curators for a retrospective. Bayona's satire draws comparisons to Ruben Östlund's 'The Square' (2017 Cannes winner) but is described as a directionless hybrid of earnest self-discovery and superficial art satire. The Golden Palm was awarded to Norwegian family drama 'Fjord'.