The End We Start From
Survival drama about a young family who must flee London after an ecological disaster and seek shelter and food in the English countryside. With Jodie Comer.
England, tomorrow: Forced out of London by cataclysmic flooding, a new mother, her partner, and their infant make their way to his parents’ home in the countryside, only to find the situation growing increasingly desperate there, as well.
Adapting Megan Hunter’s 2017 novel, director Mahalia Belo models her film on the author’s spare, elliptical prose, keeping the disaster just off-screen and letting her actors wear the pressure and tension of the story on their faces as their world gets a little smaller and a lot scarier. Jodie Comer, in a role unlike any she’s played before, balances a new mother’s physical and psychic exhaustion with an unyielding life force.
An apocalyptic drama that still makes room for hope, THE END WE START FROM uses the language of genre to ask the only question that matters about our increasingly bleak future: What will you do? And why aren’t you doing it already?