Terrorist bombs in cafes, uprisings in refugee camps, air strikes, travel restrictions, repression and despair. It should be the Middle East, but in fact this is to be the fate of the UK, according to the current film adaptation of a PD James novel Children of Men.

It's 2027 and humanity has been stricken with universal infertility, meaning the world's youngest person is now eighteen years old. The cause is unknown - it might be pollution, it might not - but it has led most of the world to collapse in civil unrest. Relative calm in the UK has led to an influx of illegal immigrants but they are hunted down, caged and sent to refugee camps by the government.

Theo (Clive Owen), once a passionate activist, is now an alcoholic who toils in his mundane government job waiting, like everyone, for the world to end. But his monotony is broken when he is abducted by a terrorist group called the Fishes, led by Julian (Julianne Moore). She persuades him to help smuggle one of their number out of the country, a young immigrant girl named Kee. Incredibly, Kee is pregnant. As the story unfolds we are ushered through a miserable and vicious world where all checks and balances - moral or political - on human behaviour have been discarded as humanity faces extinction.

Children of Men's portrayal of the future is disturbingly plausible, perhaps because it involves nothing that hasn't happened before. London in 2027 is our familiar hedonistic West melded with the urban terror of the Middle East and the racist tyranny of the Holocaust. It's unwise to believe a film can let you know what it's really like to be in a situation, but the gritty realism and blandly brutal violence of this film make watching these real life tragedies played out so close to home a very uncomfortable and thought-provoking experience indeed.

Significantly, the cause of the infertility is left ambiguous. The vision of human nature is so bleak that you get the feeling that maybe war, authoritarianism, climate change and general meaninglessness have bred a hopelessness so overpowering that humanity is just deciding to lay down and die. The apathy in response to the infertility is as frightening as the fanaticism. Theo's art-collecting brother Nigel calmly tells him he gets through each day by simply not thinking about what's happening.

But this is yet another major film with a clear Christian metaphor and despair doesn't have the final word. If the infertility is the physical mark of mankind's spiritual barrenness, into the world comes a miracle baby, born a poor and vulnerable refugee, with the power to restore faith in the future. In the most affecting scene of the film, the soft cries of this baby are enough to silence the guns of hundreds of soldiers and rebels locked in a frenzied fight to the death. Children of Men is a reminder not just of how bad the world could get, but how bad it actually is. But ultimately, there is a seed of hope which can and will overwhelm the world's worst darkness.

David Mitchell

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