At an unknown point in the near future, a woman is giving birth. As her contractions start, her home in London is flooded and, as her baby is born, it becomes clear that a climate catastrophe of biblical proportions has begun. A sea of water invades the city as the woman takes her first postpartum, post-apocalyptic pee, then flees for higher ground with her newborn in a car seat.
So begins the story of a new survival film starring the British actor Jodie Comer. The End We Start From goes on general release in UK and Irish cinemas from Friday and has a star-studded cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Joel Fry, Gina McKee, Nina Sosanya and Mark Strong all appear alongside Comer.
For the author Megan Hunter, who wrote the extraordinary 2017 novel – her debut – which the film is based on, the plot was obvious: “I’ve always had an apocalyptic imagination – I remember, even as a child, dreaming about the sea overwhelming the Earth,” she says.
After having two children in her 20s, the 39-year-old found herself writing lots of poetry and short stories about motherhood in her spare time. “Then I had this idea to write a story about a woman giving birth in the future. And it seemed inevitable to me that she would be facing a climate disaster.”
The timing of the film’s release coincides with dire warnings from scientists that warmer sea temperatures are fuelling freak weather events around the world. A study, published last week, found the world’s oceans absorbed record levels of heat in 2023.
Yet, aware that sea levels were rising, Hunter started writing the book almost nine years ago. “I wrote about a dystopian future,” she says. “But it feels like it’s become more of a book about the present moment – more and more contemporary, and more and more relevant, unfortunately.”
She deliberately chose to link the experience of a global climate catastrophe to the intimate, emotional experience of motherhood and the life-shattering impact of a baby’s birth. “I very much brought them together in one event,” she says. “So her waters break and the flood comes simultaneously.” From that moment on, “the whole film is sopping, and saturated with water”.
She hopes the book and the film – which includes magnificent shots of Comer’s character travelling with her baby through a flooded London, on a turbulent ocean and in extreme wilderness – will contribute to the conversation about the climate crisis in a way that is “emotional and beautiful and moving”.
“Central to the book and the film is the sense that our world is so beautiful, and yet this is what we’re doing to it,” she says. “But it’s also about how human beings connect to nature and how important that is for our lives.”
In Hunter’s favourite scene from the film, Comer’s character (who is deliberately nameless) steps slowly into the ocean naked – and screams. “She has this cathartic moment where she lets out all this feeling that’s been quite contained and we see again her waters breaking and the flooding of her home. It’s like she’s returning to the water, to the site of the trauma and the loss.”
But there are lighthearted moments too when, like any new parent experiencing sleep deprivation, colic or even a poonami, she is faced with a choice between laughing or crying about her situation – and she chooses laughter (or a cheeky fag).
The intention is that audiences will confront the climate catastrophe on a deeper, more personal level than disaster survival movies traditionally allow.
“Comer’s character doesn’t always know what to do: she’s confused, she’s terrified. People are losing loved ones in senseless ways. It’s chaotic. There’s not a clean heroic arc to it all. But at the same time, she’s surviving, she’s looking after her baby.”
One of the most original and powerful aspects of the film, which was “a very female-led” project directed by Mahalia Belo and adapted by Alice Birch (of Succession and Normal People fame), is the way it brings to life a key relationship in the book. And that is the bond that forms between Comer and another new mother, played by Katherine Waterston.
They meet, with their babies, while isolated from everyone else they knew before, facing challenges they never dreamed they would have to endure. “The way they support each other, the way they laugh and sing, the power of female friendship in that scenario – that’s something I don’t think we’ve seen in that genre before,” says Hunter.
In total, 15 babies were used to play the child, Zeb; breastfeeding, smiling, sitting up, crawling and learning to stand, while people around him starve and fight and die in the rain and the floods. These milestones in the development of a baby mark the passage of time and enable Comer to portray a woman whose life is punctuated with happy moments, even as sea levels rise and the crisis escalates.
“I wanted to ground the climate emergency in personal experience,” says Hunter. “It’s not just a piece of news or a piece of data.”
It soon becomes clear that, although having a baby to nurture makes her protagonist more vulnerable, it also nourishes her soul, gives her strength and feeds her survival instinct. “Parenthood pushes you to keep going, even when you feel like you can’t do it,” says Hunter. “She’s got to survive. But she’s also got to keep this baby alive.”
Perhaps because the concept of birth and the character of a baby is as central to the plot as themes of death and desecration, there is a strong thread of hope running through the film and the book. Ultimately, despite the apocalypse violently unfolding on the landscape, it’s a story about love, says Hunter.
“There’s the love of a mother for her baby, the love between her and her partner, the love between friends and the love of community. That’s what keeps people going and gives them strength.”
At the same time, she hopes that The End We Start From will help to raise awareness about the need to act urgently on the climate emergency facing our planet, or we too will face the end of life as we know it.
“If it becomes one of the most important things in the world to all of us, we’ll be able to make the changes we need to,” she says. “We’ve driven things this far with overconsumption, fossil fuels, capitalism: we’ve reached this point of total crisis. But this is where we are. And we need to start from here, from this end point we’ve reached, and create a new future.”
The End We Start From goes on general release in cinemas on 19 January. The book by Megan Hunter is published by Picador. To order a copy go to bookshop.theguardian.com
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Other apocalyptic books adapted into films
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
A father and his son walk across the US in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, searching for food as they make their way towards the sea. The nature of the apocalypse is unclear, but the terrain is “cauterised” and the air is filled with ash. There are no animals, fish or plants, and many humans have turned to cannibalism to survive.
Our critics described the book as a “very great novel” of “transforming power” but gave the 2009 film, starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, just three stars.
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (2020)
A middle-class family on holiday on Long Island are disturbed by a black couple who claim to own the Airbnb they are staying in. They say there has been an electricity blackout in New York. The phone, TV and internet won’t work, animals are fleeing, and gradually, the family realise there may have been an apocalyptic event – a world-altering calamity – that they do not know about.
Our critics said the book was a “page-turning thriller” about class, race, indecision and the agonies of parenting in the midst of an unfolding catastrophe – and gave the 2023 Netflix film, which stars Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali, four stars.
The Children of Men by PD James (1992)
Published in 1992, the novel imagines 2021 in an England where democracy was abolished because the human race has been infertile for 27 years and the population is steadily declining. Young people are worshipped for their youth, while elderly people are seen as a burden and are sometimes forced to take part in mass drownings. But as childless men wrestle for power, it emerges that one woman is hiding a very precious secret.
Our critics described the book as a “brilliant piece of dystopian science fiction” and also gave the 2006 film starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen four stars.
