Critics reviews

Comer’s vulnerability and idealism are authentic as are her determination and a dash of real ruthlessness – for a moment, she becomes one of the scary people to be encountered on the road, and not particularly regretting it afterwards. She carries everything with unselfconscious strength and style.

Comer is superb... Most of this has to play out on her silent face. If the film ends up somewhere a little too neat, Comer makes the journey always worthwhile.

“The End We Start From” is down-to-earth, beautifully conceived and thoughtful, a shrewd piece of filmmaking in support of the story’s thematic preoccupations, particularly motherhood.

There isn’t much excitement to be found in a movie whose torpor is meant to be a key part of its appeal, but Belo’s steady hand and uncompromising eye finds a slow-burning sense of drama...

But this bittersweet elegy for our society—and its optimistic notion that we still have time to rebuild—is adrift in a narrative that finds itself sunk beneath its cataclysmic peers in the genre.

Favoring quiet meditation over a dramatic emotional pull, Mahalia Belo’s The End We Start From sees Emmy-winning Jodie Comer navigate a story as muddy as the flooded grounds of Hyde Park in a post-apocalyptic drama that fails to nail the human connection at its core.

The End We Start From explores more than motherhood at the end of the world, its subject is every nuance of womanhood at any stage of life.

Comer pulls you into the whole experience – though Belo is very much her equal in making it mean something. It’s nourishing, frequently moving, and ends with heroic understatement, where a cruder film would have gone all out for the heartstrings.

Making the leap from small-screen work on such projects as the BBC’s “The Long Song” and Netflix’s “Requiem,” Belo directs with assured restraint, consistently stressing the human factor.

The horror of The End We Start From lies in its plausibility. But there’s still beauty in love and family. Ultimately, that is what the film wants us to embrace.

This may feel like familiar territory to another U.K.-set disaster film, “Children of Men,” or the recent mini-series “Station Eleven,” but Bellow has crafted something singular here. And you won’t forget it.

Despite a familiar set-up, The End We Start From wisely avoids most of the apocalyptic genre cliches, remaining on the fringes of the action so that its protagonist can have their journey.