It was The End We Start From‘s misfortune to come out not long after The Last of Us, the TV show starring Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal. Mahalia Bello’s film arrived a few months after The Last of Us had finished and covers much of the same ground, though here the focus is really on just one person, Jodie Comer’s Woman (as she’s billed). It’s pretty familiar stuff if you’ve seen The Last of Us, which most of us have.
So you know it’s the post-apocalypse, the action kicking off with a woman, or Woman, going into labour. As her waters are breaking torrential rain is pouring out of the sky, and it won’t let up until a long time later, by which time Woman, her partner R (Joel Fry) and baby Zeb (played by about 15 infants in rotation), are refugees in their own country, made homeless by the floods that have rendered their home uninhabitable.
From here a quest, towards a mythical island where everything is supposedly OK, through various locales, some of which offer sanctuary and some danger, though it’s hard to work out which on first impression. They’ll visit R’s parents (Mark Strong, Nina Sosanya), encounter fellow refugees like Katherine Waterston’s O and face adversity head-on in government shelters or on the hoof. Some people will die, others will get lost on the way, but through it all is Woman and baby Zeb, she the tiger mother determined to keep her family together and face down the apocalypse.
It’s fascinating, in the same way The Last of Us is. Should the survivors try to rebuild society together in the aftermath of its collapse? Or scavenge a solitary existence in the ruins of the old world, existing maybe as an isolated family unit and expecting nothing grander or more complex?
The big issue is the same in both cases: trust, and who gets it (no one would be the easy answer), and similarly we’re absolutely on the side of the disadvantaged.
But The End We Start From, as the title suggests, is post-apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic – concerning itself with what happens when the apocalypse ends, how life, society, the nation, civilisation is put back together. In that sense it’s a bit like Kevin Costner’s vainglorious The Postman, though this is a better film than that, subtler, and with a scorched-earth Children of Men worldview that suits the subject matter.
As well as Strong and Sosanya, Fry and the 15 infants, other actors include Benedict Cumberbatch and Gina McKee, but their fan clubs can sit this one out. There’s not much to see here apart from Comer, who holds it all together with a performance of almost everyday normality – she’s the new mother doing what any new mother would do, nothing more.
It’s a gentle film, about rebirth and the new shoots of something rather than the destruction of the old. There are no big special-effects scenes of mayhem and destruction. So it struggles to get heard a bit, against the sort of expectations raised by all the other post-apocalyptic movies.
I’d prefer more bite, and something a bit starker, with a soundtrack that wasn’t as loud and insistent, with fewer reaction shots from the various actors, who are doing fine without having to overload it. But tastes vary and for those who need another apocalypse movie as much as they need the apocalypse itself, this adaptation of Megan Hunter’s novel might offer a soft-edged way of encountering the end of the world and what comes after it.
The End We Start From – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
