The Closing Sound Children of Men (2006)

The film ends on black, and then plays the sound of children laughing

The final image of Children of Men is the Tomorrow — the Human Project's boat — emerging from the fog as Theo dies in the rowboat and Kee names her daughter Dylan. The camera holds on the boat. The shot fades to black. The credits begin to roll. And over the black screen, before any music, the sound of children laughing plays for several seconds. Then a single score cue (John Tavener's Fragments of a Prayer) takes over.

The closing sound is the film's last and largest gesture, and it does the most work with the least screen time of any decision in the picture.

The off-screen children are the film's only positive content

The film has spent two hours establishing that no human child has been born in eighteen years. There are no children in any frame of the film. The closing audio gives the audience what the entire visual structure of the film has withheld — and gives it as sound, not image. See The Human Project.

"The choice to put the laughter over the black instead of over the boat is the most important choice in the film." — Alfonso Cuarón, Indiewire (2007) (paraphrased)

Cuarón (in Children of Men) considered closing the image on the boat with the laughter laid over the visible Tomorrow. He cut the image away and held the laughter on black instead. The reasons match the reasons for keeping the Human Project unseen: hope, in the film's grammar, must be heard, not photographed. The moment you put a face to it, it becomes a thing the camera can judge.

The wind-down is a costed restoration

The film's final structural move — Theo's death, Kee's survival, the Tomorrow, the laughter — is what the Backbeats (Children of Men) sheet identifies as the costed wind-down. The protagonist dies. The world is not restored. But futurity is signaled — off-screen, audio-only, in the sound of children whose existence the film has just begun to make possible.

"It is hopelessly pessimistic, yet leaves us with reasons for hope." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2007)

Ebert's "hopelessly pessimistic, yet" is the film's specific tonal achievement. The pessimism is not undone. Theo is still dead. Bexhill is still on fire. The British state is still rounding up refugees. The Human Project is still a rumor. But the laughter happens, and the film insists on it.

The choice is a wager, not a resolution

The closing sound does not tell the audience that the future is secured. It tells the audience that the future is audible — that there is something on the other side of the catastrophe that produces the sound of children. Whether the Tomorrow arrives, whether the Human Project is real, whether Kee's daughter survives long enough to laugh — none of this is resolved. The audio is a bet.

"The film ends with a wager: that you'll trust the sound." — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) (book, not available online)

The bet is the same bet Jasper makes with the coin. See Faith vs Chance (Jasper's koan). Faith and chance, side by side, on the audio track of a black screen.