The End We Start From

Directed by Mahalia Belo

Running time: 1hr41 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Jodie Comer in The End We Start From

We’ve seen the end of the world so often on screen over the years — with various degrees of banging, whimpering or von Trier-ian melancholia — that the premise has rather lost its ability to shock. We feel we know what the apocalypse will look like, and certainly what the post-apocalypse will look like, not only because we watch movies, but because most of us have at least once been to Lidl at closing time on a Sunday.

And yet there’s something rattling about The End We Start From, a spare but effective adaptation of Megan Hunter’s jittery 2017 bestseller by first-time director Mahalia Belo and Lady Macbeth screenwriter Alice Birch, that I couldn’t immediately pin down. Beginning with a grand-scale environmental catastrophe that might not end the world but certainly halts life as we know it, this hungry survival drama doesn’t present a particularly radical vision of climate change and its consequences — realised with economical but reasonably evocative visual effects — or especially shocking challenges to its sodden, displaced characters. What it does capture, with a simplicity and emotional directness that gradually made me shiver, is the individual’s sense of abandonment and desolation amid a global disaster with little room for small-scale grief and grievances. How do you go on with no one (to say nothing of nowhere) to go to?

Our nameless protagonist, played by Jodie Comer with a sense of resolve that shatters and regathers from one scene to the next, is a new mother, which at least gives her some compass point of purpose in a life otherwise set adrift. Colossal floods drive her and her partner (Joel Fry) out of their London home, and then out of London itself; rural relatives at first provide sanctuary, but each safe place is progressively compromised and evacuated, just as each human ally is gradually lost or, by necessity, cast aside. The young mum can only live for herself and her infant, and only the latter addition keeps her from shrugging self-defeat.

There’s hope here, but of a conditional, unsentimental variety: Belo and Birch build a world that’s credible and compelling in its devastation, its physical and psychological demands articulated plainly enough to make you wonder how you’d survive it, and who you’d survive it with. And in Comer, they have one of those rare actors whose star-standard beauty and charisma doesn’t override an empathic, plausibly exhausted air of humanity: sore and crumpled and on her last nerve, but alive at the end of the world.

THE END WE START FROM (2023) Written by Alice Birch | Shot by Suzie Lavelle | Edited by Arttu Salmi.