While one of her 2023 features won’t be coming out until 2024 as Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders got delayed while a new distributor came on board, another Jodie Comer feature is arriving before the end of the year. Mahalia Belo’s debut film The End We Start From, which premiered at TIFF, will get an awards-qualifying run in NY and LA on December 8 ahead of a January 19 release. Also starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Katherine Waterston, the first trailer has now arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “When an environmental crisis sees London submerged by flood waters, a young family is torn apart in the chaos. As a woman and her newborn try and find their way home, the profound novelty of motherhood is brought into sharp focus in this intimate and poetic portrayal of family survival.”
Christopher Schobert said in his TIFF review, “The End We Start From, the debut feature from acclaimed television director Mahalia Belo, offers all the standard elements of a drama centered on a near-apocalyptic event. Early in the film, unrelenting rain pounds London, the power goes out, and water eventually trickles under the door of an unnamed pregnant woman played by Jodie Comer. She is alone in the house, tending to herself while her husband is out-of-town. Soon that trickle blasts the front door off its hinges, and before we know it she is in labor at the hospital. These scenes in the outside world are appropriately chaotic––and feel like sequences audiences have seen many, many times before.”
See the trailer below.
The End We Start From opens for one week in NY/LA on December 8 and comes to more theaters January 19.