Critics reviews

How I Live Now, in its own quiet way, works beautifully and admirably against [the dystopian future] trend, pervasive as its gloom might be, in suggesting that the sanctity of human relationships can create a barrier between the self and the crumbling world.

Aside from this unsettling and endemic property of young-adult fiction, How I Live Now is by some measure the best of the recent cinematic work in the genre, and if it ultimately obfuscates the freer possibilities of love in favor of an older author's regressiveness, the film at least presents a credible version of that love's beginning, which is more than can be said for most of these movies.

The fact that [Macdonald's] latest film, "How I Live Now," adapted from a novel by Meg Rosoff, is about a band of teens and children in the British countryside trying to stay alive after London gets hit by a nuclear explosion bodes well for the quality of the film. And indeed, for much of its running time the movie is grab-you-by-the-back-of-the-neck immediate; in its last third particularly, the bite-your-lip moments of suspense and tension mount to the extent that you may well draw blood.

The film is not without problems — there are parts where you wish you knew a bit more about what was going on, and parts where you wish you knew less. (The love affair between Daisy and Edmund is particularly weak.) However, between this unusually subtle actress and Macdonald's visually, sonically astute direction, the film ekes something new out of a spare, glancing story. There's a lot left unsaid in How I Live Now — but it's unsaid with unusual force.

Macdonald's film comes on like gangbusters, with thunderous rock over blood-red opening titles. But this misleads us about the thoughtfully disturbing film ahead. How I Live Now has lyricism, urgency, and intelligence, and if it doesn't seem to want to set the world on fire, all the better; Macdonald tells the story with confidence and the essential modesty of a superior B-movie, with all the integrity and energy that implies.

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King Of Scotland) lends this YA paperback-dystopian material a veneer of handsome seriousness: He contrasts the idyllic luster of the farm scenes with the ashen grayness of the later ones, while also straining out some of the novel's sillier elements (such as telepathy). Death creeps into the movie, like an invisible wave of radiation from a detonated nuke, and some of the imagery owes more to Cormac McCarthy than to Stephenie Meyer.

As sun-dappled infatuation abruptly crashes into post-apocalyptic survival, Mr. Macdonald struggles to balance a nebulous narrative on tentpole moments of rich emotional resonance. Neither those nor the considerable skills of Ms. Ronan are enough to save completely a film whose R rating may scare off the younger teenagers who will most appreciate its obsessive romanticism. But by divorcing the second half's random horrors from a larger political picture, Mr. Macdonald gives them a shocking immediacy, and sometimes that's enough.

How I Live Now goes to that nuclear nightmare, and Ronan, who can't hide her smarts even when the role isn't as good as the one she had in Atonement, makes a feast of the journey, zagging from obnoxious and Lohanesque to fragile and courageous in a fleetly paced plot. A desperate let's-love-while-we-can sex scene with strapping Edmond isn't nearly as affecting as shots of corpse piles and martial-law-ruled work camps. But Ronan's spin on a Katniss-like defender is redemptive.

How I Live Now, though rife with incident, feels rote and processional: Nothing we see matters, and nothing seems to mean anything at all apart from a vaguely defined resonance with Daisy's now steely courage. The film is all structure, all good taste and chalked-in characters arcs. As potential ends of the world goes, it's all awfully tidy and dull.

Seldom has the verdant splendour of the English countryside, with its mussy verges, chilly waterways and mighty, swaying natural canopies, been captured with such love and precision as it has in director Kevin Macdonald's haunting teenage doomsday parable, How I Live Now.