Next Year in Bexhill

Children of Men is set next year.

That sentence used to be a piece of trivia. Now it's a deadline. Cuarón put his collapsed Britain in 2027, and the film opens with a news bulletin: the youngest person on Earth, an 18-year-old known as Baby Diego, has been stabbed outside a bar in Buenos Aires. A café full of Londoners watches the screen in tears. Theo Faron, played by Clive Owen as a man who has stopped expecting anything, buys his coffee, walks out onto Fleet Street, and the café explodes behind him.

The camera doesn't cut. It hasn't cut since the film began. That's the first thing you notice about Children of Men, and it's the thing everybody writes about. It's also not quite true, which is the first clue to what's really going on.

The art: the long take as a moral position

The famous single shots are composites. The visual effects team at Double Negative stitched several takes together with "seamless" digital transitions. The opening café shot was filmed over two consecutive days. The car ambush on the country road was shot in six sections at four locations over a week, with a custom rig built by Doggicam so the camera could glide around the inside of the car while actors' seats tilted out of its way. The six-minute battle through the Bexhill refugee camp was captured in five takes over two locations. Cuarón has admitted that "sometimes it's more than what it looks like."

None of this matters, and all of it does. What the long take does is refuse you the edit, the moment where a normal action film lets you breathe, look away, see the hero from a safe angle. Cuarón and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, keep you at Theo's shoulder, so the violence happens beside you rather than in front of you. When blood splattered onto the lens during the battle sequence, Lubezki talked Cuarón into keeping it. It stays there for the rest of the shot, a smear on your own glasses. That's what the trick is for. It makes you a witness, and witnesses can't change the channel.

Cuarón told his art department the film was the "anti-Blade Runner". No flying cars, no neon, no gleaming towers. The future is the present, a bit dirtier, with the bins not collected. He dressed East London to look poorer, and the Shard is digitally added to the skyline because it would, he reasoned, have been built by then. Theo wears a faded London 2012 sweatshirt. Battersea Power Station has become a state art archive, with Michelangelo's David and Picasso's Guernica among the rescued works, and a pig balloon floating outside as a nod to Pink Floyd. Theo's cousin runs this "Ark of the Arts". When Theo points out that in a hundred years there will be no one left to look at any of it, the cousin says he just doesn't think about it.

The film is full of these background details, and the background is where the argument lives. TV screens announce Day 1,000 of the siege of Seattle. Government adverts tell you that hiring, feeding or sheltering an illegal immigrant is a crime. Refugees sit in roadside cages. A sign over the camp at Bexhill reads "Homeland Security". The rations come with antidepressants and Quietus, a suicide kit with a soothing advert. Michael Caine, as Theo's old friend Jasper, a retired political cartoonist growing weed in the woods, is the only person in the film still having fun, and he has to be killed to make the point that fun is over.

Is there a weakness? A small one. Kee, played by Clare-Hope Ashitey, is the first pregnant woman in eighteen years, and the script gives her less interior life than it gives the farm animals. She's funny and frightened and the film is moved by her, but she is mainly cargo, and the Nativity symbolism (the barn, the cries of "Jesus Christ") leans on her harder than she can bear. The Fishes, the militant group who want her baby as a political symbol, are motivated by plot rather than belief. These are the only places where the film's machinery shows. Everywhere else it's flawless.

The prophecy: the babies were the metaphor

As a forecast of fertility, the film is wrong, and it was never trying to be right. The cause of the infertility is never explained, on purpose. Cuarón has described it as a metaphor for a fading sense of hope. Even so, reality has shuffled closer than anyone expected. A large 2022 meta-analysis found that sperm counts among unselected men roughly halved between 1973 and 2018. South Korea's fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023, and its president called the birth rate a "national crisis" and promised a new ministry to deal with it. The UN now expects the world's population to peak in the mid-2080s and then start falling. Babies are still being born, millions of them. But the idea of a nation looking at its maternity wards and seeing a security problem is no longer fiction.

The real hit is the border. In 2006, a Britain that hunts asylum seekers "like cockroaches", as Jasper puts it, keeps them in camps and bans its citizens from helping them was meant to feel like a warning. Seventeen years later Parliament passed the Illegal Migration Act 2023, placing a duty on the Home Secretary to remove people who arrive irregularly and widening the powers to detain them. The government spent years trying to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda until the Supreme Court ruled the plan unlawful in November 2023. From August 2023, asylum seekers were housed on the Bibby Stockholm, a barge moored in Portland harbour in Dorset, until the last of them left in November 2024. None of this is Bexhill. There are no machine guns on the promenade. But the film's essential claim is that a frightened country will make refugees the place where it stores its fear, and that was a forecast, not a mood.

Even Quietus has edged closer. Canada provided medically assisted deaths to 15,343 people in 2023, about 4.7% of all deaths, and 622 of them to people whose death was not reasonably foreseeable. In November 2024 MPs voted by 330 to 275 to back a bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults in England and Wales. None of this is an advert on the Tube. But the film's line, that a society without a future will start offering its citizens a dignified exit, now reads as a policy debate rather than a nightmare.

And one throwaway detail lands like a slap. Theo and Julian's son, Jasper tells Kee, died in a flu pandemic in 2008. The film came out in 2006. In 2009 there was a flu pandemic.

The reading

Children of Men is the best film we've reviewed. It's a chase thriller, a Nativity play and a documentary about the year after next, and it never stops moving long enough to lecture you. As prophecy it got the cause wrong and the consequences right, which is the better way round. In 2027 the babies will still come. The camps, the barges, the fear dressed as procedure: those came early. The film ends with a small boat at sea and the sound of children laughing. It's the most hopeful ending of any dystopia, and the hope arrives the way it does in real life, on a rowing boat, without papers.