Mahalia Belo’s sure-footed debut begins with a heavily pregnant woman about to go into labour. The lurking camera of the cinematographer Anna Meredith and the sinister score by Suzie Lavelle telegraph something more extraordinary than childbirth. The heroine’s waters break in tandem with mass flooding across London.
Adapted from Megan Hunter’s 2017 novel, Alice Birch’s compelling script explores a fierce maternalism against an apocalyptic backdrop, deftly moving between gritty circumstances and allegorical overtones. There are parallels with How We Live Now and Children of Men, but the survival instincts depicted here are new, feminised territory.
The baby is only hours old when the woman (Jodie Comer) and her partner (Joel Fry) are forced to flee the city in search of higher ground. They find refuge with his parents, but only for a brief hiatus. As the crisis worsens, food runs out and the family are ripped apart.
The woman and baby move to a government-run emergency camp. There is no place for her husband, who is left to make his own way through the catastrophe. At the camp the woman encounters another young mother (Katherine Waterston), a good-humoured companion with plans to travel to an island off the coast, where a utopian commune awaits.
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During their subsequent trek through damp and lonely roads, they encounter a lonely survivor who has lost everything (Benedict Cumberbatch, who also produced) and suggests that their utopian destination may not be what they think.
By focusing on human-sized and domestic drama, The End We Start From can’t match the escalating jeopardy and horrific narrative punch of such similarly themed, bigger-budgeted fare as The Road or I Am Legend. The film’s quiet strength, in step with Comer’s character, lies in its familiarity. The actor, who shouldered much of Killing Eve and all of the extraordinary Tony-winning one-woman play Prima Facie, is outstanding as the unnamed heroine. She’s aided by a gifted ensemble of screen partners through an unexpectedly restrained biblical storyline.
