Vague Visages’ The End We Start From essay contains spoilers. Mahalia Belo’s 2023 film features Jodie Comer, Katherine Waterston and Benedict Cumberbatch. Check out VV movie reviews, along with cast/character articles, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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People are biologically programmed to anticipate the end; our individual demise is a foregone conclusion that is perpetually creeping in. These existential worries take an aggressive, predictable shape in the form of the post-apocalyptic drama which casts each person’s fear of death onto the death of mankind. With each election cycle or outbreak of disease, there will be a slew of comparisons to some bleak examples of a fictional world driven to chaos. Such analogies acknowledge and conceal an interesting, painful truth that thrums beneath this genre — that for many people, the apocalypse has happened, and that for the rest of us, it sits quietly, implied within the rhythms of everyday life. 

Mahalia Belo’s The End We Start From takes the more far-fetched aspects of the post-apocalyptic genre and grounds them in the familiar and the human — feeling through the texture of such cataclysmic events. Jodie Comer plays the anonymously titled “Mother,” a woman who is caught on the brink of parenthood, blissfully unaware of how the rain outside will soon puncture her maternal bubble. Within the scope of an afternoon, Mother goes into labor, and gives birth to her baby, unknowingly sacrificing her high-ceilinged, wood-floored London house to the rolling waves of a flood. All of this plays out in The End We Start From’s first 10 minutes, cleverly creating the event as one piece of the ensuing apocalypse. Mother and her partner, R (Joel Fry), escape to his parents’ (Nina Sosanya and Mark Strong) house in the countryside with their newborn son. From a comfortable vantage point, the couple watches the world dissolve into some haphazardly organized madness.

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It’s in this atypical structure that Belo’s adaption of Megan Hunter’s 2017 novel thrives, stretching into its most comfortable shape. For Mother and son, the end comes in spurts — an ugly dance between people and their environments. There are blissful moments, sunny afternoons and dancing beneath the moonlight, but these are breaks in the relentless tempo of seeking out a warm bed, the next meal and a place to rest. There are occasional zoom outs — moments where the world is caught in disarray, with people strewn across a weather-beaten landscape — but for the most part, Belo conveys Mother’s progression across the world in close-ups. The protagonist’s surprise and despair and fury are broken into pieces, like flicking through a picture book of feelings, each flashing and fading with startling speed. 

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The End We Start From’s intimate take on world dissolution is the opposite from the genre’s impulses, which are grand and frequently engaging, rather than inspiring, in their scope. Even the best versions of these grandiose stories, particularly Alfonso Cuarón’s masterful Children of Men (2006), are often sidetracked by grimy details. Life is absorbed via long shots, circling the characters with predatory ease. Part of the effectiveness of such shot-making is to draw attention to the craft. The actors ducking and weaving around the careening camera are offscreen, but their efforts are keenly felt, bleeding into the onscreen urgency. Still, there is something violently impersonal to this technique, with shock and discomfort blurred in streaks across such action scenes. 

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If Belo’s story is about a family that starts out safely cocooned — from within looking out — Sam Esmail’s 2023 adaptation of Leave the World Behind follows a family as they scatter, obsessively interrogating one another for answers — on the outside, looking inwards. Death and destruction are at arm’s length for the Sandfords and the Scotts, but they remain insulated (or incapacitated) by their wealth. It is this positionality that consumes the idea of the apocalypse, always grappling with how the social hierarchy reconfigures under the weight of a new world order. But The End We Start From is intrigued by the things we can’t shake from our old lives, the responsibilities that cling and threaten to drown us (fittingly). Leave the World Behind and the contained M. Night Shyamalan thrillers it draws from — namely Signs (2002) and The Happening (2008) — are interested in the threat we pose to one another, rather than the inexact, incalculable will driving us to rebuild.

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I recently told my friend, Hannah Gibson (a brilliant writer), what thoughts and questions were hovering at the edges of this piece. “It’s all stuff that I think about quite a lot. I’m sure like yourself. Hope, the end, saying goodbye, ‘getting the job done,'” I explained over a text message. Hannah responded with a slew of pertinent questions, chief of which was: “Who has the privilege of giving up hope? And living past that point?” That is the tension that guides, punctuates and potentially upends this style. Even in death, there is inequality, and the only worthwhile thing genre storytellers can do is acknowledge this perpetual unevenness. 

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In Children of Men, when Theo (Clive Owen) approaches his cousin, Nigel (Danny Huston) — a government official who lives atop a London monument, floating above a city shrouded in disease and depression — the audience is confronted with a marbled, serene hideaway. The saturated color scheme draws out the cool apathy of this space, in comparison to the shadowy discord of the world below. “What keeps you going?” Theo inquires, bemused by his relative’s callous remove. Nigel spreads his arms and says, “I just don’t think about it.” Suddenly,  his evilness is re-contextualized; lethargy settles over the skyline like a weighted blanket. 

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Almost every post-apocalyptic project taps into the nearness and accessibility of such indifference. These films know that audiences intimately understand a desire for inaction. But while Cuarón assumes viewers will relate to Children of Men’s Theo rather than the activists he eventually partners with, Belo knows that many people have no choice but to fight the constricting requirements of a fascist world. When Mother is faced with the chance to live in an island commune in The End We Start From, she turns it down, refusing to live her life parallel to suffering. Her decision is contextualized by a conversation she shared with a stranger (Benedict Cumberbatch as AB) a few nights before. The man expresses a desire to go back to the city he lost his loved ones in, desperate to expose himself to the feelings which had driven him away, exhausted by the distance which blunts his grief. 

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The End We Start From is a contained version of the violent, end-of-world tales we have grown accustomed to. In its quiet examination of a woman’s journey to motherhood, the questions that surround the subject are writ large on the story. Mother’s pilgrimage across England is broken into questions: who is forced to continue living past hope and death? How is that gendered? Mother treks across wild, rain-soaked pastures to end up where she began. It is an apt metaphor for the survival genre as a whole: every few years, we are absorbed by a host of new existential threats, yet we return to the same feelings of confusion. In The End We Start From, incoherent grief is held in the image of two women wading through a weather-torn country with their newborn babies.

Anna McKibbin (@annarosemary) is a freelance film critic. She received a journalism MA from City University and specializes in pop culture. Anna has written for London Film School, Film Cred and We Love Cinema.

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