"Children of Men" (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is set in Britain in 2027, eighteen years after humanity lost the ability to have children. The film follows Theo Faron, a disillusioned former activist, as he is drawn into protecting Kee, a young refugee who is inexplicably pregnant, and the ending turns on whether her baby reaches a ship called the Tomorrow that may hold the key to humanity's future.
The film adapts P.D. James's 1992 novel of the same name, though it changes much of her plot while keeping the core premise: global infertility, a Britain turned authoritarian, and one impossible pregnancy. Cuarón built the story around Theo's journey from apathy to self-sacrifice, using it to examine how societies treat refugees and the powerless when fear takes over.
Table of Contents
- What Is the World of "Children of Men"?
- How Does Theo Get Involved With Kee?
- What Happens in the Second Half of the Film?
- What Happens in the Famous Bexhill Ending?
- What Does the Ending Mean?
What Is the World of "Children of Men"?
The film opens in London in 2027. No child has been born anywhere on Earth since 2009, a global event the film never fully explains. Civilization has not collapsed everywhere, but Britain has turned into a near-police state, the only nation shown still functioning with organized government. Britain's government runs mass deportation campaigns against "Fugees" (refugees), herding them into cages and detention camps.
Propaganda broadcasts urge citizens to report suspected illegal immigrants, while homegrown terrorism, including a group called the Fishes, fights the government in the name of refugee rights. Theo Faron, played by Clive Owen, works a dull government job and numbs himself with alcohol, having lost his young son to a flu pandemic years earlier and separated from his activist ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore). The opening scene establishes the film's stakes immediately: a television in a coffee shop reports the death of "Baby Diego," the youngest person on Earth, at eighteen years old, killed in a bar fight. His death triggers public mourning because he represented the last living link to a time when children existed. Moments later, a bomb explodes in the same coffee shop Theo just left, showing how routine violence has become in this Britain.
How Does Theo Get Involved With Kee?
Julian, now a leader within the Fishes, re-enters Theo's life and asks him to secure transit papers for a young refugee woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) to reach the coast. Theo agrees mainly for money, unaware of why Kee needs safe passage until he discovers she is pregnant, the first pregnancy anywhere in nearly two decades. Shortly after this discovery, Julian is killed in an ambush, and the Fishes splinter. A faction led by Luke reveals it intends to use Kee's pregnancy as a political tool for the refugee cause rather than get her safely out of the country.
Theo realizes the Fishes who recruited him are not protectors but captors with their own agenda, and he commits to getting Kee away from them. Theo, Kee, and Miriam (a former midwife traveling with Kee) escape to the rural home of Jasper (Michael Caine), Theo's old friend, a former political cartoonist turned pot-growing hermit living with his catatonic wife. Jasper tells Theo the group's only real hope is reaching the Human Project, a scientific organization rumored to be researching the infertility crisis from a ship, the Tomorrow, that waits offshore to pick up refugees of scientific importance. Reaching that ship becomes the film's central goal.
What Happens in the Second Half of the Film?
Fishes gunmen attack Jasper's house looking for Kee, and Jasper sacrifices himself so Theo, Kee, and Miriam can escape. The group needs forged transit papers to reach the coast, which sends them to Theo's cousin Nigel, a government official who deals in looted art while refugees are rounded up around him. Nigel agrees to get papers, but only ones that route the group through the Bexhill refugee camp, a brutal holding zone the film shows as the endpoint for anyone the state no longer wants.
Kee gives birth to a daughter in a squalid farmhouse while the group is on the run, with Miriam acting as midwife since no doctor has delivered a live birth in eighteen years. Soon after, Miriam is captured by the Fishes, who intend to take Kee's baby to use as a bargaining chip, forcing Theo and Kee to flee again, this time into the Bexhill camp itself. Inside Bexhill, the group hides among the refugee population while the Fishes track them down. The camp sits on the edge of open warfare between the British military and an armed refugee uprising, and Kee's baby becomes the one thing in the entire camp that both sides momentarily stop fighting over.
What Happens in the Famous Bexhill Ending?
The film's climax takes place during a full-scale military assault on Bexhill. Theo, Kee, and the newborn hide in a crumbling apartment building caught between army tanks and refugee fighters. The sequence is shot largely as unbroken, continuous takes, a technique Cuarón used to immerse viewers directly in the chaos rather than cutting away from the violence. As Theo carries Kee and the baby through the building and out into the street, the infant's crying stops both armed sides mid-fight. Soldiers and refugee fighters alike lower their weapons and watch in silence as mother and child pass, a moment that dramatizes how a child's presence instantly overrides the conflict's politics.
The silence breaks only once Theo, Kee, and the baby are safely past the fighters, and the battle resumes behind them. Theo gets Kee and the baby to a rowboat and out to open water to meet the Tomorrow, but he is shot during the escape from Bexhill, a wound sustained earlier in the building that proves fatal. In the boat, Theo teaches Kee a breathing exercise to calm her crying baby, the same exercise Miriam had taught Kee earlier. He dies in the boat just as the Tomorrow emerges from the fog to meet them, his task complete. The film ends before showing whether the Human Project actually solves the infertility crisis; the last sounds the audience hears are children's voices playing, laid over the final shot of the ship, suggesting the fertility crisis's reversal rather than confirming it outright.
What Does the Ending Mean?
The ending withholds a definitive resolution on purpose. Cuarón never confirms the Human Project will cure the broader infertility crisis, and the film never explains what caused it in the first place. The focus stays on Theo's personal arc: a man who began the film isolated and indifferent ends it by giving his life so one child has a chance at safety. The Bexhill ceasefire moment functions as the film's clearest thesis.
Soldiers and refugee fighters, who moments before were trying to kill each other, stop entirely at the sound of a crying infant, showing that the film treats the return of a child as something that briefly restores shared humanity on both sides of a political divide. That the baby is Black and the mother a refugee, in a film about a Britain that imprisons refugees, makes that silence a pointed comment on who the society Theo lives in has been willing to discard. The closing audio of children's laughter over the ship's arrival is the film's only suggestion of hope, and it's left ambiguous whether it represents the actual future or simply the sound of possibility arriving with Kee's daughter. Cuarón has described wanting the ending to feel like the start of a path rather than a solved problem, which is why the Tomorrow's arrival closes Theo's story without closing the world's.