"The End We Start From"

    ☆☆½ 

For a movie about the end of the world, or at least about the end of civilization as we know it, The End We Start From is awfully melancholy. Maybe we learned too much in the pandemic: an apocalypse probably won't be accompanied by screaming in the streets and military jets zooming overhead. As we saw ourselves, the beginning of the end can feel surprisingly small and downbeat.

So, I guess it makes sense that The End We Start From is so lugubrious and often dull. But if it's reasonably true to life, it doesn't make for a very involving movie. The End We Start From is engaging enough in fits and starts, but more often so slow it threatens to come to a complete stop.

Jodie Comer plays the unnamed woman at the center of the story, a very expectant mother living in London during one excessively rainy summer, which we gather—and much of this movie requires extrapolation; it's not a film that likes to explain—is the result of a climate catastrophe. She, her husband and her newborn flee to his parents' house on higher ground. The world collapses around them.

And it collapses with rather alarming speed. If we saw for ourselves that the world is shockingly, maybe even disturbingly, resilient (and quick to shrug off the worst), in The World We Live In, society seems to fall apart within a matter of weeks, and in short order the woman and her husband are debating whether to spend time in a shelter.

For those who plan on seeing The End We Start From, it's best to stop there because what few surprises the story contains are about all that keep its energy from flagging. It's a wet rag in every possible way, except for Comer's central performance. She's always interesting, though the movie doesn't give her character much depth. Worse is her husband, presented here as a coward and a dullard; ultimately, the movie's central question becomes whether she will find him again. I kept hoping she wouldn't, and would just start a new and more interesting life.

More strange is the scale of the crisis. We get the sense it's supposed to be massive, yet outside of London there's no sign of disaster, save one brief mention late in the film. Without clarity on the stakes, or the extent to which the world will need to begin again, it's hard to feel very invested. Is it wrong to wish that when the world ends, at least in the movies, it'll feel at least a little significant?

Viewed January 21, 2023 — AMC Universal 16

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