Children of Men

In 2027, humanity has not conceived a child for eighteen years. The world has slid into war and collapse, Britain has become a police state, refugees are herded into camps, and the news is announcing the death of the youngest person on Earth. Into this world comes Theo, a burnt-out civil servant whose ex-wife asks him to get a young woman out of the country. The woman is called Kee, and she is pregnant.

The film's future is next year. Cuarón pushed it that close deliberately: he told his art department that this film was "the anti-Blade Runner" — no gleam, no flying cars, the future should look exactly like the present, only more tired and shabbier. The Shard was digitally added to the London skyline from early architectural drawings, since it hadn't been built when they shot but would be by the time the film is set; references to the 2012 Olympics run through the background, because London had been named host a few months before filming. That decision is why, twenty years on, the film hasn't dated — it has ripened.

What made it a reference point in film history is the long take. The roadside ambush runs four minutes seven seconds; the Bexhill street battle, in which Theo walks through a raging engagement looking for the girl, six minutes eighteen; the birth scene three minutes nineteen. The continuity is partly an illusion: the effects team stitched multiple takes together — the ambush was shot in six sections at four locations over a week, with five seamless digital transitions — and more than a hundred such effects were created for the film. Cuarón admitted it himself: "Maybe I'm spilling a big secret, but sometimes it's more than what it looks like." The street battle shot took fourteen days to prepare and five hours to reset for each retake. When blood splattered onto the lens mid-shot, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki talked the director into leaving it in — it is still there.

There is a great deal Cuarón declines to explain, and that is deliberate. The film never says what made humanity infertile. "There's a kind of cinema I detest, which is a cinema that is about exposition and explanations… It's become what I call a medium for lazy readers," he said. Infertility here isn't a scientific problem but a metaphor: the slow draining away of hope. He left the ending open in the same spirit — a hopeful person will see a great deal of hope in it, and a bleak one will see complete hopelessness.

The film flopped in 2006. Its distributor pushed it into awards season with virtually no marketing, it barely recouped in cinemas, and it took three Oscar nominations without a single win. Then it began to grow. In the extras on the DVD, Slavoj Žižek called it the best diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism; in the BBC's 2016 poll of a hundred and twenty-seven critics it came thirteenth among the best films of the twenty-first century, and it placed thirteenth again on the New York Times' equivalent list in 2025. Some films can only be watched properly in retrospect. This is one of them.