I was not at all prepared for How I Live Now

I put this flick on, stupidly at about 11pm. Don’t do that if you like sleeping and hate terrifying nuclear war nightmares.

I guess I am a little sensitive: if you haven’t noticed yet my taste tends to ere towards light and cheery. I do enjoy post-apocalyptic drama very much, especially when the horror feels like just a few miss steps away from reality. How I Live Now is set in a world that is at once recognisable and horrific.

Based on Meg Rosoff's young adult fiction novel of the same name, this movie has a young female audience in mind. It has a moody lead (the ridiculously excellent Saoirse Ronan as Daisy), a forbidden love, a story of growth and self-discovery. It just mixes all these familiar attributes with nuclear fallout and brutal barbaric modern warfare. It’s a weird mix, but it works.

I was already familiar with the book having half listened to it on audio book a year or so ago. There is something about seeing it on-screen, boiled down to 101 minutes, that gets you in the gut. It’s directed by Kevin MacDonald who gave me similar feelings of visceral dread in The Last King Of Scotland.

It follows the story of Daisy, a teenage American grumpus who comes to England to live with her twee country cousins and spends the first few days insulting them. She quickly realizes she’s got it bad for her hot cousin Edmund, and cheers right up.

The world seems to be in some kind of pickle, and Daisy’s aunt is a diplomat who leaves the kiddos alone to go try save the world. She didn’t do a great job, as soon after she leaves the world all but ends in one of the most chilling nuclear fallout scenes I have ever seen.

Things are actually all right for a bit, as our gang of wholesome but wild kids move into a barn to escape evacuation and have a lovely, sunny montage of fishing, cooking, running through fields etc. Also lots of first cousin boning goes down. It’s a nuclear war, so who am I to judge?

When the army gets involved it all goes terribly, terribly down hill. (SPOILERS!) Daisy has to now face all sorts of uncomfortable scenarios including but not limited to, witnessing violent gang rape, digging through piles of decaying bodies to finding a loved one, killing more would be rapists and finding the incestuous love of her life so badly tortured that he becomes a mute. This is aimed at 16 year olds BTW. Jezzus.

It made me think of the time, long ago, when I watched one of the Twilight movies (not sure which one), and the climax of the movie was when some good vampires and bad vampires met up and gave each other vaguely threatening looks. How patronizing that seems after watching the onslaught of misery that is this film.

I should say now I bloody loved this movie. The fact the story is told through a young woman’s voice gives a vitality and romance to the seriously grim situations. Saoirse Ronan does a masterful job at making Daisy seem like a hateful brat at first. Daisy's personal problems make it hard for her to interact with people in a normal, not aggressive fashion, but when shit hits the fan she really comes into her own. The fact that most of the movie is focused on Daisy and her little cousin Piper (a wonderful performance from Harley Bird) as they try to find the boys, shows the horrors of war through women’s eyes, with every encounter all the more sinister. It made me want to watch more post-apocalyptic young adult fiction adaptations (any suggestions?).

If you still need convincing, the soundtrack is by none other than Jon Hopkins.

First published on strongfemalelead.wordpress.com