To take a highly regarded book and adapt it into a feature as your first foray into directing is pretty bold, and a little bit rude for anyone else who has to follow. Mahalia Belo expertly portrays a clear empathy for her characters and an apparent connection to the source material. The book is one I read a while ago and really felt an attachment to. It is written in a poetic format, with a vague lack of empathy, laying out the events as they occur and with sparse descriptions. Even through this, the film is adapted in a way that basically mirrors the image I had in my head and captures the relationships perfectly.
Not at all held back by Jodie Comer, playing The Woman, who does not have a name. She takes on another accent with this one, exploring motherhood through this eco apocalyptic drama.
Our tale begins in London, with The Woman drawing a bath and talking to her stomach. We watch a bit of a morning routine as she dresses and looks out at the heavy downpour outside of her window. In the most intense pathetic fallacy put to screen, her water breaks and the house begins to flood. We watch as London quickly succumbs to the perils of skyward weather and sinks below the surface. In the meantime, we sit in the endless rows of traffic as people scramble to find refuge out of the city. The Woman, her husband R (Joel Fry) and the new baby Zeb (many babies contributed to the role of Zeb) are among them. They play the newborn card and are allowed into the high altitude village where R’s parents live. They survive for a while before circumstances change and they split off into their own survival journeys.
The story has a lot of mid stage changes that I feel would spoil the experience by outlining, but I will at least bring up O (Katherine Waterston), who enters later on into the plot, sparking up a really beautiful friendship with The Woman. They show such tenacity to continue and fight on for their futures without big explosions or military threat.
I appreciate this story as an apocalyptic one because of the smallness of it. It is not all air raid sirens and guns. It is people, living and adapting to a life shattering act of nature. They show inherent kindness and also inherent unkindness. The film focuses only on the story of The Woman and Zeb, so only events directly impacting them are only ones we are privy to. There seems like an urge in the standard apocalypse films to showcase the destruction left behind or zoom out to reveal its impact on the wider world. This story is central and intimate, it recounts one story with a principal relationship and the small circle around it. The only glimpses into the state of everyone else is when The Woman visits large groups or tunes into the news broadcasts.
I don’t feel any of this took away from the understanding of the world we are in, there is a desperation for survival, without action packed and daring set pieces to keep it in your mind.
The relationship that The Woman and Zeb share is so perfectly outlined, with an arc of love and acceptance. In both the film and the original text, there is a clear trepidation towards motherhood and the doubts that seep in during this time. The Woman is experiencing a shift in her life and her marriage, not exactly knowing how to deal with it. She is careful to show R love in the beginning, caring just as much as she did before Zeb was born. However, throughout the film, the more time The Woman bonds with Zeb, it becomes part of her, the connection she feels isn’t conscious like she felt in the beginning. It is true and real and natural.
Having such a central presence on one character can be risky, if your actor can’t pull off holding the whole film together, but we don’t need to worry about that here, Jodie Comer is playing that character. She carries this film from the end to the start with such an understanding of the character. Add on top of that, she spends most of her time with a baby under five months old, so the film relies on mostly her to tell that story and build the emotional connection. It is hard to be surprised after seeing her in Prima Facie, a one woman show where you understand every character she describes and feel every connection she outlines.
The supporting cast around her do a great job at grounding the story outside of The Woman’s head, with their own tales of the flood. In particular O, is such a standout, delivering some Londonised American sarcasm, lightening up the story and giving The Woman someone to lean on during these obviously trying times.
With this being a film about a flood, the flood bit is done really well! The heavy VFX work is sparse but is effective when used to showcase the scale of the destruction.
In between the VFX, we have pretty intimate camera work, centralising The Woman in the story and also the frame for a lot of the film. They don’t try to push the boundary with their shot choice, just ensuring that we have some nice and pretty backgrounds to watch the story unfold. Suzie Lavelle is the DoP of this film, previously working on Normal People which indicates that she has an eye for how to tell an intimate and loving story. Good choice.
Anna Meredith takes on the music of this film, having worked on Eighth Grade before this. So you also know that she is very capable of telling a human story through her work, allowing the story to take centre stage but filling in the gaps with some plinks, plonks and fiddles of the violin. Good choice also.
Technically, the film stands up, storywise, actingwise, the film also stands up. Adapting a very personal book into something that can stand alongside it, is very impressive. It is always cool to see British film be praised on a wide scale like this, even with the select few critics jumping in to relay their points about not feeling the stakes of the world. While all art is subjective, it seems like such a disservice to the material to not appreciate what it is trying to achieve rather than attempting to cram it into a predetermined box of expectations. I have and will dislike films based on what I wanted them to be, but in the case where I like it and others don’t, they are wrong for not “getting it”. I’m literally so smart and intuitive, it’s crazy.
The End We Start From is a film where I only understood the title halfway through, and was very proud of myself for being tuned into the film and its themes. It not only has set up clever title expectations for me, but also ones about small apocalypse stories. I had a period of reading this and All That’s Left In The World which was a similarly small story to this one. I now just want more of this, and fast.
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