What a momentous thing to watch the world crumble before your eyes and make the decision to still try to love it, to raise it again. It’s the driving force of Mahalia Belo’s moving feature debut The End We Start From, a dystopian portrait of a new world and a mother that understands disaster and hope as intimate bedfellows.
Jodie Comer anchors the film as an unnamed woman whose waters break as those of London do too — she’s about to give birth as catastrophic storms flood the city, forcing her new family to find a new life. Belio, alongside screenwriter Alice Birch, adapts Megan Hunter’s 2017 novel of the same name with open-hearted courage, despite occasionally heavy-handed metaphors.
