“The End We Started From” : Jodie Comer stars in the listless film adaptation of Megan Hunter’s best-selling novel.
Movie “The End We Started From” Highhlights:
Floods are one of the extreme weather disasters that occur on a planet with a changing climate, and are both devastating and poetic in a literary sense. After all, the first apocalypse recorded in multiple ancient texts is the Flood.
But there’s also so much symbolism that “The End We Started From,” based on Megan Hunter’s acclaimed novel, drowns. The action begins with a bathtub slowly filling for a woman (played by Jodie Comer, identified only as “Woman” in the credits). She is very pregnant and the bath is very relaxing, allowing him to release the tense blood vessels in her body without feeling the weight of gravity.
Just as the inner bathtub is full of water, the outside world is full of water. A woman and her partner, R (Joel Fry), live in London, which is quickly looking more and more like Venice without its bridges and islands. The woman goes into labor and when the baby is born, she and R will not be able to return home. While watching TV, R jokes that the baby’s name is Noah. They left the hospital and, like everyone else in England, headed to a village on higher ground. However, they are only allowed entry because R’s parents live there and have a two-day-old baby in their car.
From here on out, it’s a survival movie, the story of a woman who must protect her child through a series of shelters, journeys, and horrific encounters of the kind familiar from post-apocalyptic stories. Separated from R, she misses him and wonders if there will ever be a place in the world for her little family again. She meets her friend O (Katherine Waterston), whose baby is two months older than the woman and whose partner is not worth pursuing. They develop a kind of connection across the desert, a friendship that can keep each other alive.
Adapted by Alice Birch and directed by Mahalia Bello, The End We Start From is neither an adventure nor an action film, but it is both. The work operates in a more poetic mode, with many perspective shots and ambiguous images of nature and water, lulling the viewer into a meditative mode. The End We Started From is not only about survival in a destroyed world, but also about the early struggles of becoming a mother. And it’s better when it leans toward the former, like when characters discuss why they have children.
But as the Woman progresses, her journey becomes strangely boring. “The End We Start From” has very little tension and some might argue that makes it more authentic. Real life after a disaster is all about trying to survive, including long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. However, the approximate quality of this material probably worked better on the page than on the screen. For example, the strangers a woman encounters feel structured like a capital T. Humans have a variety of human reactions to life after the storm, including belligerence, kindness, fear, dark humor, trying to remember, and trying to forget.
This seems very intentional, given that the main characters have no discernible names and most of them have a story. But it’s exhausting, and despite Comer’s usual strong performance, the film never raises serious doubts that Woman will manage to finish the film. The question is, what kind of world will her baby be in?
The power of the film“The End We Started From” seems to lie in the question of whether it is worth trying to recreate the world as it was before or whether it is worth surrendering to a different kind of existence. That’s a difficult question to consider. The memory of a time just a few years ago when we were forced to ask ourselves the same questions and live with the uncertainty of the answers is still fresh.
But “The End We Started From” doesn’t seem to know quite where that question will land, and at the same time, it doesn’t give us enough information to analyze. It’s a shame, considering Bello’s powerful visual imagination. Instead, the film’s most moving moment is that of a woman pleading with her baby. “I’m sorry, I’ll fix this,” she tells the baby, telling him a story that may or may not be true. “We’ll head back home, and as time goes on, you’ll grow taller, stronger, and even kinder. Eventually, these memories will fade away, and you won’t recall any of what happened.”
“This is not what it’s supposed to be,” she concluded, echoing what everyone feels on and off screen. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” she said as she walked away from her. Sometimes, there’s just nothing left to talk about.
Movie “The End We Started From“ : Stars
Director: Mahalia Bello
Author: Alice Birch, Megan Hunter
Stars: Ramnik Ahluwalia, Elena Baylova, Shiona Brown, Ruth Clarkson, Jodie Comer
Rating: R(some gruesome post-apocalyptic encounters and maternal nudity)
Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes
Genres Drama: Thriller
The End We Started From is for grown-ups because it has some scary fightening scenes and a few moments where is shown without clothes. It lasts for 1 hour and 42 minutes. You can watch it in theaters.