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About twenty minutes into Children of Men, Theo Faron walks into a power station to ask his cousin for a favour. The cousin, Nigel, runs something the government calls the Ark of the Arts. He greets Theo beside Michelangelo’s David. The statue is missing a shin. Where the bone should be there is a piece of metal. Nigel says it like an apology: they could not save the Pietà.
Then they sit down to eat under Picasso’s Guernica, which hangs behind the table like wallpaper. Out of the window, a giant inflatable pig floats between the chimneys. Theo asks, more or less, what any of it is for, when in a hundred years there will be nobody left to look at it. Nigel’s answer is honest. He just does not think about it.
That scene is only a few minutes long, and it is not the one people talk about. But if you want the Children of Men meaning, it is all there. This is a film about a world that has stopped protecting people, and started protecting things.
What Children of Men is really about
Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film is based on P.D. James’s 1992 novel. It is set in Britain in 2027. No child has been born anywhere on earth for eighteen years. The film opens on a black screen, with a newsreader’s voice. The youngest person alive, a young man the world calls Baby Diego, has been killed in a fight. People in a London coffee shop stand and cry at the television. Theo (Clive Owen) pushes past them, buys his coffee, walks out, and the shop explodes behind him.
Most dystopian films spend a lot of time on the cause. This one spends none. Nobody says why the babies stopped coming. In an interview with Combustible Celluloid, Cuarón said he was not interested in explaining the infertility, because once you explain it, the film becomes about that. He said he cannot stand exposition. So the question is never why. The question is what people do with the time they have left.
The answer the film gives is bleak and very specific. Society keeps running. The trains run. The civil servants go to work. But everything it protects is an object. Nigel’s warehouse protects statues. The state protects its borders, so the refugees who have fled to Britain are caged, bused, and dumped in a seaside town called Bexhill behind fences. And the government protects the exit. There is a drug called Quietus, sold in suicide kits, and its advert on the side of a bus tells you that you decide when it is time.
Look at what each of those is. A statue is a thing that outlasts you. A fence is a thing that keeps others out. A pill is a thing that ends the waiting. None of them is a person. A world that no longer believes in a future has quietly moved its care from people to property.
Theo is part of that world, not a rebel against it. His old friend Jasper (Michael Caine) tells a visitor that Theo and his ex-wife Julian once had a son, Dylan, who died in a flu pandemic in 2008. Jasper’s summary is short: Theo’s faith lost out to chance. Theo drinks, keeps his head down, and when Julian (Julianne Moore) reappears and asks him for help, his first question is about money.
The barn, and the joke that saves the scene
Julian is killed in an ambush on a country road, and the camera never cuts away. Theo is left with a young refugee woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), who has something to show him. She takes him into a barn full of cows and shows him that she is pregnant. The first pregnancy on earth in eighteen years, revealed in a shed full of animals.
The film knows exactly what picture it is drawing. And then it lets Kee puncture it herself. Later, when Theo asks who the father is, she says she is a virgin, holds his face for a second, and bursts out laughing. She has no idea who the father is.
That joke matters. It stops the film from turning Kee into a symbol, which is precisely what everyone around her wants to do. The Fishes, the resistance group Julian led, want the baby so they can use it to start an uprising. Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who had Julian killed to get control, talks about the child as a flag. The government would use it the same way, which is why Kee has to be smuggled out to a ship called the Tomorrow, run by a group called the Human Project that may not even exist.
Everyone wants to protect the baby as a thing. Theo, to his own surprise, ends up protecting her as a person. The difference is the whole film.
What the camera refuses to cut away from
Here is the part a casual viewer may feel without ever quite noticing.
Children of Men is famous for its long takes. The car ambush runs for minutes without a cut. The final battle in the Bexhill camp runs even longer, with the camera following Theo through stairwells and courtyards while the army shells the building. At one point blood from a shot man spatters the lens, and it stays there. The cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, persuaded Cuarón to keep the take. In that same Combustible Celluloid interview, Cuarón said the long shots were not there to show off. They were about honouring the moments of truthfulness, and when the crew became aware of the camera, they would cut.
So this is a film that will not look away. It shows you Julian’s death in full. It shows you the camp in full. It gives you no edit to hide behind.
And then notice what it does with the one thing everyone is fighting over. The baby is almost never shown as a spectacle. She is wrapped up, held low, kept close to Kee’s chest. For most of the climax you hear her more than you see her.
Then comes the moment the whole film has been building toward. Theo and Kee walk down a stairwell in the middle of a firefight, and the baby cries. The shooting stops. Soldiers lower their rifles and step back against the walls. Somebody shouts to cease fire, and the three of them walk out through a corridor of men who, a second ago, were killing each other. The pause lasts until the next explosion, and then the war starts again as if nothing happened.
The only thing that ever stops the violence in this film is a sound. Not an image, not a speech, not a weapon. A baby crying. Nearly two hours of unflinching camera work, and the single most powerful event in it arrives through the ears.
There is one more frame around all this. The film opens on a black screen and the news of a dead child. It ends on a black screen with the sound of children laughing. The children of the title are almost never on screen. We hear them at both ends, and in between we see one newborn, barely. The film called Children of Men is about a world that lost them, and it keeps them just out of sight the whole way through.
The man who does not get to see the ship
Theo is shot by Luke during the escape. He does not mention it. He gets Kee and the baby into a small boat and rows them out through the fog toward a buoy, where the Tomorrow is meant to meet them. Behind them, planes bomb the camp.
In the boat, the baby cries, and Theo shows Kee how to burp her. That is his last useful act. Not a speech. A small practical thing a parent knows. Kee notices the blood in the bottom of the boat, understands, and tells him she will name the baby Dylan, after his son. Theo slumps over. Then the ship comes out of the fog.
He does not see it. That is the detail that stays with people. He gets Kee all the way to the edge of the future and dies one minute before it arrives.
Other stories have told this before. In Kurosawa’s Ikiru, a dying man finishes one small, concrete thing and never sees what it becomes. In Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe, a soldier waits his whole life for the event that finally arrives as he is leaving. Children of Men belongs with them, but it adds something. Theo’s reward is not the ship. His reward is the hour in the boat, with the baby on his chest, teaching someone else how to hold her.
There is a very old story that works the same way. In Luke’s gospel, an old man named Simeon has waited in the temple for most of his life. One day a young couple walks in with a newborn, and he takes the child in his arms and says he can die now. In the King James wording, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace… for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” He never sees what the child grows up to do. He sees the child. That is enough. (An old widow named Anna is in the same scene, and her story is even more quietly remarkable.)
Nobody in Children of Men quotes that passage, and nothing here claims Cuarón had it in mind. But the film arrives at the same answer to Nigel’s question. What keeps you going is not a thing that will outlast you. Nigel’s statues are a kind of despair with good lighting. What keeps you going is a person you hand on to the next person, even if you never find out what happens to them. Theo’s eyes see the baby safe. The ship is for somebody else.
Back in the boat
Watch the ending again and listen to Kee. She is talking to a dead man. “Theo, the boat. The boat. We are safe now.” She is telling him the news he died a minute too early to hear. The Tomorrow slides out of the grey. The screen goes black. The children laugh.
The world in this film saved the David and lost the Pietà, saved its borders and lost its people, and offered everyone a pill for the waiting. One tired man saved one baby and never saw the ship. The film is quite clear about which of those was worth doing.
Discussion question
The film never explains why the world went infertile, and Cuarón has said that was deliberate. Does leaving the cause blank make Children of Men stronger, or does it leave you wanting more? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Children of Men Q&A
What is Children of Men really about?
Children of Men (2006, directed by Alfonso Cuarón) is set in a world where no child has been born for eighteen years. The film is less about infertility than about what a society does when it believes it has no future. It shows a world protecting objects, borders, and suicide kits instead of people, and follows one man, Theo Faron, who ends up protecting a single pregnant woman and her baby as a person rather than a symbol.
What does the ending of Children of Men mean?
At the end of Children of Men, Theo rows Kee and her newborn to a buoy to meet the ship Tomorrow. He has been shot and dies in the boat just before the ship appears out of the fog. Kee names the baby Dylan, after Theo’s dead son. The ending means Theo completes his task without seeing its result. The screen goes black and children’s laughter plays, which is the film’s one direct signal that a future exists.
Why is the film called Children of Men?
The title of Children of Men comes from P.D. James’s 1992 novel, which takes it from Psalm 90 in the old English wording used in the Anglican prayer book, where God tells the “children of men” to return to dust. In the film, the children are almost never shown on screen. The story opens with news of a dead young man and ends with the sound of unseen children laughing.
Why does Children of Men never explain the infertility?
Alfonso Cuarón has said in interviews that he was not interested in explaining the infertility in Children of Men, because explaining it would make the film about that. He has also said he cannot stand exposition and wants audiences to reach their own conclusions. The infertility works as a setting, not a mystery, so the film can focus on how people behave when they believe nothing comes after them.
Why does the fighting stop when the baby cries in Children of Men?
In the Bexhill camp sequence of Children of Men, soldiers and rebels stop shooting when they hear Kee’s baby cry. Nobody in the world has heard a newborn in eighteen years. The soldiers lower their weapons and let Theo, Kee and the baby walk out. The cease-fire lasts only until the next explosion, which is the film’s point: the baby does not end the war, but she is the one thing that can interrupt it.
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Just realised Children of Men opens on a black screen with news of a dead kid and ends on a black screen with kids laughing. The children of the title are never really on screen. Two hours in between and I never noticed.
Children of Men is a film about a world that saved Michelangelo’s David and lost its people. Theo saves one baby and never sees the ship. The movie knows which one mattered.
Two hours of long takes that refuse to look away from anything, and the only thing that stops the war in Children of Men is a sound. A baby crying. That is the film in one scene.
