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Stunning, distopian film.

For some reason, I hadn’t seen any trailers or reviews for this film (nor had I read the book by P. D. James on which it is based), but when I saw it on LOVEfilm, I vaguely remembered that I’d heard some buzz about it. The plot synopsis looked intriguing, so I put it in the queue. The premise is this: 20 years from now (2027), humans are in crisis. No children have been born for 18 years, for some reason that no-one can understand. In the absence of either understanding or hope, society is breaking down, and the more prosperous countries like the UK are facing high levels of immigration from people trying to find a better life. As a consequence, Britain is in a fascist lockdown, and ‘fugees’ are rounded up and kept in cages or squalid refugee camps. Violent, half-feral terrorists called ‘fishes’ bomb businesses, throw rocks at commuter trains and act like highwaymen on motorbikes.

In the midst of this, our hero Theo (an ex-peace campaigner) is offered money by his ex-girlfriend Julian (and mother of their son who died in the 2008 ‘flu pandemic) to get papers for a fugee called Kee. Kee — miraculously — is pregnant, the first pregnancy in more than 18 years, and they want to get her to a free colony run by the mysterious ‘Human Project’. Theo is reluctantly drawn into the action, and tries to protect Kee and her baby.

This film could have gone the Hollywood, gung-ho action route, but instead it goes with frighteningly realistic violence. There are passing shots of bits of technology, but it’s clear that we haven’t got very far: there’s litter and grafitti everywhere, tuk-tuks puttering down Fleet Street, and choking pollution everywhere. I liked the fleeting juxtapositions that you see in this film. There are armed police lining railway platforms, adverts on TV screens that could be a joint production between the Daily Mail and the BNP, and the government is handing out suicide packs (called ‘Quietude’ ‘Quietus’). But down The Mall, there are uniformed Horseguards on parade as usual, and zebras wandering around the city parks.

Unfortunately, you can easily imagine Britain going this way, particularly if there were no children being born. Whatever you think about children, they do at least tend to make people think about something other than themselves. In a world without them, I can imagine that it would be every person for themselves to an even greater extent than happens today. The armed lockdown and refugee camps don’t seem like a big step away from our current steady erosion of civil liberties.

There’s a climactic battle in the refugee compound in Bexhill, and the contrast between what we know today as a fairly sleepy seaside town and the warzone we see in the film is extreme. But while I was watching, I was thinking that this is exactly what people in Sarajevo and Baghdad and many other places experience for real. The shop where you used to buy your fruit is blown apart by tank shells, the bench on which you used to sit and chat to your friend on a Sunday morning is crushed by falling masonry. Meanwhile, you, your family, friends and neighbours cower like rats in the remaining buildings, dodging bullets and mortars and wondering where your unremarkable, quiet little town went.

Despite all this grimness, there are flashes of gallows humour in the film. During an escape, Theo has to leave his shoes behind. He tries to borrow some from ageing hippy Jasper, but the only ones he can find to fit are flip-flops. In most of the remaining action sequences, he’s trying to dash about in this ridiculous footwear, cursing when he cuts his feet on broken glass or twigs. That’s the kind of detail action heroes don’t usually have to deal with. When Theo and Kee are stuck in the middle of some hellish crossfire, Theo asks of the crying baby, “How is she?”. Kee answers (accurately), “Annoyed!”. There’s a wonderful visual joke for Pink Floyd fans that I won’t spoil. There are also unexplained themes which add a lot of texture to the film. Despite the fact that the human species is unable to reproduce, animals seem to be doing fine, and almost every scene has animals in it. Theo seems particularly attractive to animals, and dogs come up to him wagging their tails and kittens try to climb his trouser leg.

There are some superb performances from the whole cast. Clive Owen underplays Theo brilliantly, Michael Caine is wonderful as a disreputable old hippy who used to be a political cartoonist (cartoons by Steve Bell, incidentally), and Pam Ferris plays out of work midwife Miriam with edgy intensity. Actually, Pam Ferris with dreads and a brow ring is quite a sight.

In short, this is a film I’d really recommend.