How I Live Now (2013)

Kevin Macdonald's How I Live Now arrives with the credentials of a serious festival item: Saoirse Ronan as Daisy, a sour American teenager shipped to the English countryside, a nuclear device detonated in London, and a long walk home through a landscape of massacres. It is a small, grim film, adapted from Meg Rosoff's young adult novel and financed on the understanding that it would be cast with unknown faces. It is also, for our purposes, a barren field. The modern auditor will find almost nothing here to catalog.

The cast is white and British, assembled without any visible inclusion agenda, and no queer characters appear. Race goes unmentioned. The catastrophe is terrorism and warheads, not weather, so the environmental reading collapses on contact. Nobody interrogates capital, and nobody's relationship to their own body is at issue. Daisy is called neurotic in the opening minutes, a word the film uses as characterization and then discards. History is not revised. It is merely detonated. The one faint signal is Daisy herself, a girl who shoots two men in the woods and keeps walking, and even this the film subordinates to a romance with her cousin, a development the novel also indulged and which no amount of Ronan's composure makes less strange. The film treats her survival as young adult machinery, not as a thesis.

The result is a specimen from 2013, a year that now reads as the last of an older dispensation. The film wants to break your heart, not improve your politics, and it ends with a mute, scarred Eddie and a promise of care. There is no sermon, no lesson, no moment in which a character turns toward the camera's general direction and explains how we should all be living. The score, accordingly, is low, and the experience is oddly restful. We could almost call it a holiday.