In a near-future where women are sterile and England’s prosperity is a magnet for illegal immigrants, the world’s youngest person dies aged 18. This astonishing story opens with an unlikely outpouring of grief and an all too real explosion, thus establishing both theme and tone. Yet prosperity is a relative term: the outside world is a wasteland and the shabby, infested, rubble-strewn streets of London resemble Beirut at its darkest. Sterility is attributed to pollution or Godly intervention, and terrorism is a fact of daily life. Less interested in stylish possibility, Cuarón prefers to generate convincing realism from his dystopian nightmare that wrestles with the utter despair of a soulless future.

The result is nothing short of extraordinary as John Wyndham meets George Orwell in P.D. James’s atypical theological-thriller. When a reactionary group recruits the reluctant Faron (Owen) to safeguard mankind’s potential saviour, the spiralling violence is all consuming. Street-fighting has seldom felt so real. Cuarón underscores the social dislocation with a visit to Faron’s privileged relative who saves art from the philistines: among them Picasso’s Guernica and a flying pig. It is a testament to our new world order that such a film should be conceived so plausibly: the creeping terror generated by scenes of caged immigrants and civil disorder is a chilling sensory experience. As Faron fights among the debris of human endeavour, his encounter with hope (Caine channelling an elder John Lennon) provides the film’s lighter moments and steers him beyond the abyss. Nervy, bleak and unremitting, Children Of Men is a remarkable work, an apocalyptic vision that ranks among the best.

// COLIN FRASER