A review and social commentary of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men presents a dystopian world that blurs the line between speculative fiction and political thriller. While it may technically fall within the category of futuristic fiction, the world it constructs serves more as a grim reflection of our contemporary society. Through visuals of neglected cities, displaced populations, and heavily militarized borders, Cuarón critiques the structural violence of late capitalism and the xenophobic policies it sustains in the face of mass migration. His cinematic language points toward a powerful intersection of politics and hope, authority and resistance.

Set in 2027 Britain, the world has descended into despair following global infertility. Eighteen years have passed since the last child was born. With no future generations to come, society falls into a state of resignation, nihilism, and escalating authoritarianism. The United Kingdom stands as the last surviving state, a functioning nation clinging to law and order amidst the global collapse. Surrounded by fences and police forces, Britain becomes both sanctuary and fortress, where masses of refugees are greeted not with protection, but with weapons, cages, and brutality. Within this framework, a militant group known as “The Fishes” fights for immigrant rights, but is quickly labeled as a terrorist threat.

My intention is not to review the film, but rather to use it as a point of departure for reflecting on the concept of hope, understood here as a driving force, one that compels both individuals and institutions to act. Children of Men hinges on this notion of hope: on the one hand, the hope for future life, faith placed in a coming generation. On the other, the hope for restoring a known order, embodied by militarized national power clinging to a vision of security and stability.

Hope, then, appears as a double-edged force. It may serve as a motor of change, opening up the possibility of new ways of being, seeing, and relating. But it may also work to uphold an existing order, liberal, functional, productive, framed by imagined peace and promised safety.

The film’s depiction of the state is key. The rest of the world, now collapsed, appears as a vision of savagery and ruin. Britain, by contrast, is cast as civilization’s last refuge. The implication is subtle but strong: the state is presented not just as protector, but as precondition for life. In Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres examines this myth, the belief that only through the state can a future be envisioned or made possible. Children of Men dramatizes this illusion. The British state’s hope lies in preserving its difference from the rest of the world, its claim to survival, and in restoring the very notion of “development” on which liberal democracies depend. Everything outside of the state is cast as void, as something to be completed, ordered, or redeemed.

This worldview helps justify the film’s violent apparatus: tanks in the streets, dogs at border checkpoints, soldiers on rooftops. The function of the police is to protect not simply the population, but the foundational structures of the liberal state. As Mark Neocleous argues, policing today no longer responds merely to crime. It preempts it. It wages war on disorder, where “disorder” includes any refusal to support the norms of production, discipline, and functionality demanded by dominant power. Crime control becomes a vehicle for much larger political and ideological aims. As Neocleous notes, “the policing of crime becomes a legitimization of police power.”

The result is a permanent condition of exception. Surveillance no longer regulates, it destabilizes. Excessive force becomes normalized, and irregularity is justified in the name of preserving order. As Byung-Chul Han puts it, surveillance no longer creates regularities, but an ongoing irregularity in the name of regularity.

These mechanisms are not natural. They are practiced and performed. They are enacted daily under the guise of “national security,” a concept which, as Neocleous argues, functions not only to address military threats but also to define identity, political unity, and cultural boundaries. “Security,” he writes, operates as a mechanism for the political constitution of identity, and thus for the unity of the political community. In this sense, containment, particularly of migrants, becomes more than detention. It is a tool for governing movement, for segmenting populations, for maintaining a desired political geography.

On this point, scholars Martina Tazzioli and Glenda Garelli describe Europe’s hotspot system not merely as a space of detention, but as an active strategy to channel, reroute, and sort migratory flows. The “hotspot,” they argue, is not just a checkpoint. It is a technology of governance. It signals a logic of presence management, where being seen, categorized, or counted is a form of control. “To govern migration through containment,” they write, “means to worry not only about where migrants go, but about the meaning of their presence.”

This is precisely the reality Children of Men forces us to confront, one not confined to cinema screens, but embedded in our present. Irregularity parades as regularity. Emergency becomes daily life.

And yet, resistance is not absent. It takes the form of The Fishes, but more significantly, it emerges in the body of Kee, a woman who is miraculously pregnant. Her child becomes the embodiment of radical potential, an image of renewal unbound from the frameworks that have failed us. The possibility of something wholly new, of hope untethered from order, requires us to think outside the narratives we’ve inherited. In the film, that narrative is global infertility. In our world, it may be the hegemony of capitalism, of liberal democracy, of the security state.

Acts of refusal or subversion may take many forms. They may be contradictory or fragile. But all of them respond to the conditions in which they are embedded. So what remains? Perhaps only this: if we are to imagine new forms of life, of governance, of safety, we must begin by rethinking democracy itself. Not asking what kind of police or government we want, but:

What kind of society do we want to live in?

References

Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State. Monte Avila Editores, 1978.
Han, Clara. Experience: Being Policed as a Condition of Life (Chile). Chicago Scholarship Online, 2017.
Neocleous, Mark. Critique of Security. Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Policía & Democracia. “The Police We Live With Is Precisely What Liberalism Wants from Its Police.”
Tazzioli, Martina, and Garelli, Glenda. “Containment beyond Detention: The Hotspot System and Disrupted Migration Movements across Europe.” Society and Space, 2020.

Written by Isabel Gallaher