Jodie Comer in The End We Start From (2023)
There are plenty of reasons to hesitate before bringing a child into this world: financial, interpersonal, practical, ethical. But for millennia, even ‘end-of-days’ threats haven’t stopped many longed-for babies being born. People celebrated new life while accepting the likelihood of nuclear annihilation, and now, we coo at the tiny feet of newborns while simultaneously worrying about the climate crisis.
In The End We Start From, a new unnamed mother (Jodie Comer) and her partner R (Joel Fry) beam at their squishy little addition to the family, and for a moment, forget that London has been thrown into chaos by heavy rainfall and flooding that broke out while she was in labour. Once reality kicks in, they find safety in a house on rural higher ground belonging to R’s parents (Nina Sosanya and Mark Strong) and settle in for some self-sufficiency involving well-stocked store cupboards, farming vegetables and freshly-hunted game.
As the film progresses, the baby itself serves as a marker of time, holding up its chubby-cheeked head at three months, sitting upright at six, and tentative steps at one year. While the scale of a single year was a clear narrative choice, it also robs the film of much of its impact. Granted, whole cities weren’t underwater during the recent pandemic, so perhaps it’s no indicator of how Britain would handle such a disaster, but here society seems to degrade at a ludicrous pace. The level of brutal nihilism reaches The Road (2009) levels over just a few weeks. People even set up remote communes where talk of the world they left behind is prohibited, all within a timeframe comparable to a single season of Strictly Come Dancing (2004-).
These hasty descents into hopelessness (despite it simply stopping raining midway through) make the stakes increasingly hard to invest in. Jodie Comer gives another nuanced and emotionally raw performance, but by the final act, even she seems unintimidated by the new status quo. We get plenty of flashbacks where she longs for the world before all this, where we see her making eye contact with ‘R’ in twinkly-lit restaurants. The two have serviceable chemistry, but there is little sense of whether their previous life and relationship is worth fighting for. Even her bond with son Zeb and a new friend and fellow mother, played by Katherine Waterston, feel a little two-dimensional, her maternal instincts blandly stalwart while Waterson falls into comic-relief sidekick mode.
The film is rarely dull in its sub-two-hour run time, sustaining our curiosity as mother Comer travels across Britain seeking refuge at government encampments and remote islands with fellow survivors – all of which have a sinister edge. There are glimmers of a bright future ahead for debut feature director Mahalia Belo, who has an elegant eye and a knack for building suspense. But despite Comer’s best efforts, The End We Start From goes out with a whimper rather than a bang.
► The End We Start From is in UK cinemas from 19 January.