HOW I LIVE NOW (2013)

Genre: Drama
Director: Kevin Macdonald 
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Tom Holland, Anna Chancellor, George McKay, Corey Johnson
RunTime: 1 hr 41 mins
Rating: M18 (Sexual Scene)
Released By: MVP and GV
Official Website: https://www.facebook.com/HowILiveNow

Opening Day: 23 January 2014

Synopsis: Set in the near-future UK, Ronan plays Daisy, an American teenager sent to stay with relatives in the English countryside. Initially withdrawn and alienated, she begins to warm up to her charming surroundings, and strikes up a romance with the handsome Edmund (George MacKay). But on the fringes of their idyllic summer days are tense news reports of an escalating conflict in Europe. As the UK falls into a violent, chaotic military state, Daisy finds herself hiding and fighting to survive.

Movie Review:

Yet another adaptation of a YA novel, ‘How I Live Now’ is Meg Rosoff’s 2004 novel of an attitudinal American adolescent named Daisy (played by Saoirse Ronan) who arrives in the U.K. to stay at a distant cousin’s house in the English countryside and is forced into post-apocalyptic survival mode when a nuclear device devastates London. Given its target audience, there is of course a love story thrown in, in this case between Daisy and her stalwart handsome cousin Edmond (George McKay) with whom she falls in love with just before the outbreak of what we hear is compared to World War III.

Whether due to budgetary constraints or as a pure artistic choice, the depiction of such a cataclysmic geopolitical event is uncharacteristically muted. So we hear the news reports on TV, we see the ash raining down from the sky, we see even the soldiers in their chemical suits forcing the evacuation of Daisy and her cousins into refugee camps, and finally we witness the brutality of some paramilitary force that’s supposedly part of the ‘bad guys’, but really at no point during the movie do we get a real sense of the danger and urgency of the situation.

We’re not familiar with the book, but it seems in adapting Rosoff’s novel, director Kevin MacDonald’s regular screenwriting companion Jeremy Brock has retained the intimate - and we might add, excessively narrow - scope that places its focus on one thing and one thing alone, Daisy. That might be palatable if Daisy were a more compelling character, but as it is, she is no more than a disagreeable brat of a teenager who hides her vulnerability behind bleached-out bangs and coal-black eyeliner - and oh, the fact that she is also anoxeric and germophobic doesn’t exactly garner much additional sympathy.

Indeed, the first half hour of the movie only emphasises her petulant behaviour, throwing tantrums around the house she shares with the enthusiastic 14-year-old Isaac (Tom Holland) and a much younger Piper (Harley Bird) except when Edmond is around. Nuclear winter hits and the kids are forced to move into a barn deep into the woods on their own - their mom (Anna Chancellor) is nowhere to be seen after the bomb - until the army comes and sends them packing into gender segregated camps.

Even at this stage, there feels little peril, and one could easily pass off the camps as evacuation centres following some natural disaster. A brief skirmish in the woods with some members of a paramiliary group lets MacDonald engage in some display of graphic violence akin to his most respectable work yet, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, but otherwise the images of genocide and body-bagged corpses seem scattershot and obligatory. Daisy’s subsequent trek through the woods with Piper to return to the barn also feels tedious, chiefly because there is little dynamic that Daisy - caught up most of the time in her self-absorbed world with her own thoughts in voiceover no less - shares with Piper.

Worse still, Ronan’s performance hardly draws you into her character. Gradually typecast in such roles (remember Stephanie Meyer’s ‘The Host’?), Ronan’s previous screen incarnations have proven that she is better at playing a Katniss Everdeen-styled heroine than a teenager caught in the throes of passionate love; unfortunately, she is called upon to do a lot of the latter here and given very few opportunities to play the former. The other teenage members of the cast barely register too, but that is also because the film trains its focus on Daisy and little else.

Like we said, that isn’t a problem in and of itself, but such a character study that is presumably intended to portray the confusion and terror of adolescents caught in events beyond their understanding and control requires a much stronger emotional and moral centre. Vacillating between a teenage romance and a wartime survival story does little favours, especially since the two parts remain distinct. And because it lacks consistency and a clear vision of what exactly it wants to be, this dystopic teen romance meanders and bores, hardly the kind of science fiction you want to be bothered with now or any time in the near future. 

Movie Rating:

(Neither a fully-fleshed apocalyptic thriller nor a moving teenage romance, this YA adaptation is not likely to satisfy its teenage demographic nor win many adult fans as well)

Review by Gabriel Chong