The End We Start From review: post-apocalyptic Jodie Comer thriller

The End We Start From review: post-apocalyptic Jodie Comer thriller

In the post-apocalyptic drama “The End We Start From”, Jodie Comer gives a startling performance as an unnamed new mother who goes into labour in her London home just as the house begins to flood as a result of incessant rain, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. “Waters are breaking in more ways than one.”

The rest of the film, which was adapted from a novel by Megan Hunter, chronicles her efforts to keep herself and her baby safe as a climate change-induced catastrophe overwhelms the country.

Comer’s character has a partner (Joel Fry), and there are small roles for Benedict Cumberbatch (the film’s co-producer), Gina McKee, Mark Strong and Katherine Waterston; but this is really Comer’s picture, and it’s nice to hear her talking in her “actual Liverpudlian accent” for a change. It’s just a pity she has so few lines to deliver: “Alice Birch’s screenplay keeps the dialogue extremely spare and, frankly, the film is 20% too enigmatic for my liking.”

With its depiction of disintegrating supply chains and society’s collapse into “a snarling, semi-feral competition for resources”, “The End We Start From” could have been a generic “survival movie”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But it’s “far more intriguing and insightful” than that. Cinematographer Suzie Lavelle “draws us into the soft, cocooned space shared by mother and baby”; and Anna Meredith’s score “needles like a building panic attack”.

I can think of few other films that get into “the skin of new motherhood”, with its terrors and furious primal love, “as inventively and effectively as this one”. It’s also “the kind of film the UK rarely makes any more”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times: “a clever, propulsive picture with enough mainstream oomph for multiplexes”.