HOW I LIVE NOW (Kevin Macdonald). 101 minutes. Opens Friday (November 15). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Twilight-style forbidden romance meets Red Dawn populism in this tonally inconsistent teen-oriented dystopian drama from Britain.
Daisy (Saoirse Ronan), a sullen American teenager with OCD, arrives in the English countryside to spend the summer with her step-cousins when a nuclear attack throws the country into chaos, separating them all. Her love for the eldest son ignites her desire to reunite with them.
It gets off to a subtle enough and at times almost poetic start, but only scattered moments of genuine suspense punctuate the carpet bombing of teen and war movie clichés. Both the romance and the world-building are half-baked, and the captivating Ronan can’t do much to salvage the material. The script lecherously dwells on her incestuous relationship and has her deliver an overly petulant interior monologue.
Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King Of Scotland) shows a baffling desire to mix gritty realism (piles of dead bodies, point-blank shootings, implied rape victims escaping their vaguely ethnic captors) with ludicrous dream sequences of shirtless hunks.
The film wants to be serious, but its survivalist narrative runs aground on a tawdry romance ickier than the apocalypse it’s portraying.
