Review of How I Live Now (2013) by Al M — 23 Mar 2014

How I Live Now is a film about every reason the human race should be exterminated wholesale, but it is simultaneously a film about the power of redemption, self-actualization, and love-the reasons that we should be saved. A British drama from the director of The Last King of Scotland, How I live Now follows an alienated, depressed, and disaffected American teenager as she moves to a rural farm in Great Britain to live with her cousins as Europe devolves into nuclear war.

Depressed to the point of self-hatred with a head constantly abuzz with the white noise of the digital era, Daisy (as she belligerently prefers to be called) lives her live according to all of the proscriptions she has learned from magazines, television, and internet: what's good and bad for you, how to make yourself pretty, how to be successful, how to get and keep a man, how to have a perfect body with hair that exactly frames your face, etc. All the bullshit that the media attempts to sell us on a daily basis has been internalized as an extremely limited system of rules that keep Daisy from ever being able to open up beyond the headphones that she uses to create a wall of isolation. Then, she meets her cousins and slowly begins to soften, to fall in love, to learn how to have fun, and to learn how to love herself. Unfortunately, shortly after she achieves some form of self-actualization, London is destroyed by nuclear device, and Britain devolves into a martial law always at war with supposedly fascist terrorists.

The film is deliberately vague about the identity of the attackers or the political situation that caused the bombing, and, in the end, it doesn't matter because it is simultaneously a film about the beauty of small, simple, natural things and the horrors of the global political landscape, which is bolstered by technologies no human should have ever desired. It is about the darkness and the goodness in the heart of humankind and about how the macro-level forces intrude upon our daily lives even though we have nothing to do with them. Military forces are always a step away from fascism, and even our supposedly "good," "ethical" democracies commit acts as evil as those we typically only ascribe to terrorists, fascists, and dictators.

A truly emotional and intelligent journey, How I Live Now is beautiful, horrifying, and haunting. It is a harrowing sinusoidal wave of emotions as we watch young people learn to survive, love, and create identities for themselves no matter how bleak, absurd, and shitty the adult world gets.