‘The End We Start From’ Review: A Watery Apocalypse and a New Beginning

Flooding is among the extreme weather disasters on offer on a planet with a changing climate, and that’s both catastrophic and, in a literary sense, poetic. The first apocalypse recorded in more than one ancient text is, after all, a deluge.

But there is such a thing as too much symbolism, and “The End We Start From,” adapted from Megan Hunter’s acclaimed best-selling novel, is drowning. The action starts in a bathtub that’s slowly filling for a woman (played by Jodie Comer and identified in the credits only as “Woman”). She is heavily pregnant, and the bath is soothing, a weightless relief for her strained vessel of a body.

As the water fills the bathtub inside, the world is filling up with water outside. Woman and her partner, R (Joel Fry), live in London, which is rapidly coming to resemble Venice without the bridges and islands. Woman goes into labor, and by the time the baby is born, she and R cannot return home. R, looking at the television, jokes about naming the baby Noah. They leave the hospital and head, like everyone else in England, for a village on higher ground. But they’re only permitted to enter because R’s parents live there, and because they have a two-day-old baby in the car.

From here it’s a survival movie, a story in which Woman must protect her child through a series of shelters and journeys and fearsome encounters of a sort familiar in postapocalyptic tales. Separated from R, she yearns for him, wondering if the world will ever have a place for their little family again. She meets a friend, O (Katherine Waterston), whose baby is two months older than Woman’s and whose partner is not worth yearning for. They form a kind of connection through the wilderness, a friendship that might keep them both alive.