Take your pick of stories about people escorting the dying flames of life across the barren wasteland of the apocalypse and you’d likely be right on the money for what The End We Start From is reminding you of. Children of Men, The Road, The Last of Us—it’s hard not to directly refer back to these when watching director Mahalia Belo’s tale of a new mother attempting to navigate a flooded Britain in search of a safe haven for herself and her child.
But The End We Start From is derivative of such stories instead of being an entry alongside them with its own purpose or point of view. It reaches for the heights its progenitors offer and struggles to maintain an identity of its own. It doesn’t have the potent philosophical musings or accomplished formal chops of Children of Men, it doesn’t capture the bleak severity of The Road, and it doesn’t manage the heartbreak of The Last of Us. The End We Start From is an archetype searching for meaning.
This is made even more evident when considering that The End We Start From adapts Megan Hunter’s novel of the same name, a book that seeks to differentiate itself with its specific perspective of motherhood and womanhood amid a crumbling society. This is a worthwhile distinction, but Belo’s debut feature is too drifting to grasp the wide-reaching effects of its catastrophe or to truly convey the desperation and devotion of its main character.
This discursiveness is tied to the film’s subjective point-of-view, everything filtered through our nameless protagonist (Jodie Comer). Comer’s character experiences the beginnings of this great flood through a woozy haze: A regular storm soon becomes an unrelenting deluge, the water slowly filling up the rooms of her home until rupturing the glass panels of the windows and doors, rushing inside just as she’s going into labor. It plays as if it’s a memory recalled from far in the future, the flashes of remembrance abruptly giving way to her giving birth in the hospital room, her husband (Joel Fry) by her side as the two go back and forth on a name for their new son.
Meanwhile, their city is ravaged by floodwater, and the trio sets off into a world unshackled from the typical rules of civility, the grips of martial law and frenzy of total anarchy pushing and pulling against each other to see which will win out in this new world. The End We Start From isn’t as interested in depicting the grim social codes of a world turned to chaos as it is the perspective of a woman wondering what it means to be a mother in such a place. Many of the new, stark realities the disaster has established are merely alluded to through dialogue or suggested by the filmmaking in more oblique manners—the specifics of a character’s fate delayed until it comes up conversationally, or a gunshot fired off-screen with the implications inferred by the viewer as we stay on Comer.
This restraint should ostensibly result in a film that’s devastatingly in tune with its protagonist’s headspace, experiencing disaster through the lens of a fractured psyche. In practice, though, events meander and the story’s subjectivity feels frustratingly vague. Comer’s character aimlessly bounces from one temporary refuge to the next, meeting a collection of characters that help fill out the fringes of this post-flood world but never offer much in the way of true interiority or a method of drawing out the emotional core of Comer’s character. The supporting cast is made up of welcome (if a bit distracting) British heavyweights. You have Mark Strong or Benedict Cumberbatch in near-cameo roles, while Katherine Waterston has a bit more to chew on as a fellow mother that Comer meets at a shelter, the two finding strength and solidarity in one another as they search for a sense of peace.
If anyone keeps The End We Start From above water, though, it’s Comer herself. A constantly brave and emotionally absorbing actor, she communicates more of her character’s sorrow through a stray line reading or look in her eyes than what the actual script provides her. She offers a grounded authenticity to fill in the bleary edges of the story. You get close to feeling the true weight of the situation resting on her shoulders. What does the future of our world look like for future generations? How do we reconcile the desire for a family with a world threatened by ecological collapse? But this bittersweet elegy for our society—and its optimistic notion that we still have time to rebuild—is adrift in a narrative that finds itself sunk beneath its cataclysmic peers in the genre.
Directors: Mahalia Belo
Writers: Alice Birch
Starring: Jodie Comer, Benedict Cumberbatch, Katherine Waterston, Mark Strong
Release Date: December 8, 2023
Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.