When her waters break, life changes for ever for the heavily pregnant unnamed Woman (a phenomenal Jodie Comer) at the heart of Mahalia Belo’s superb feature debut The End We Start From. The onset of labour coincides, almost to the moment, with a national disaster, the catastrophic breaching of London’s flood defences, which leaves the capital and much of the rest of the country submerged and uninhabitable. As supply chains disintegrate, civilisation starts to collapse into a snarling, semi-feral competition for resources.
But what sounds like the setup for a generic, post-apocalyptic survival movie is actually far more intriguing and insightful. The film, adapted by Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth, Normal People) from a novel by Megan Hunter, uses environmental catastrophe – the moment-to-moment uncertainty, the sense of worlds torn apart – as a metaphor for the crisis mode that kicks in during new motherhood. And it’s not just the mother-child connection that the film captures, but also the intense female friendships that ignite between new mothers. Katherine Waterston bursts into the film like the sun finally breaking through the clouds, shifting the picture’s energy and giving the Woman a confidante and support system.
Belo’s intimate, tactile approach works terrifically well: cinematographer Suzie Lavelle draws us into the soft, cocooned space shared by mother and baby, even as violence rages on the edge of the frame. Anna Meredith’s pulsing score needles like a building panic attack. I can think of few other films that get into the skin of new motherhood, with its formless terrors and fierce, furious primal love, as inventively and effectively as this one.
