The bleakest movie I've ever seen

...never actually existed

While growing up, I would visit my extended family in Beijing at least once every four years. In a world without streaming and a household with a stingy (i.e. nonexistent) budget for movie rentals and purchases, this was my best opportunity to get exposed to new films by stocking up on bootleg DVDs for about 1 USD apiece.

At the time, a typical street vendor would stock a few dozen discs ranging from recent classics to current release blockbusters, with a smattering of surprises in between. The merchandise was typically packaged in a flimsy cellophane envelope containing a folded card-stock insert that had a facsimile of the actual DVD packaging printed on top. Surprisingly, the discs themselves were often printed in full color to match their legitimate counterparts. The source of the footage might be a shaky camcorder from inside of a theater, an unauthorized rip from a screener copy, or an exact duplicate of a retail copy. But there was no way to tell until you took it home and watched it.

It was the summer of 2007, one year before the infamous Beijing Olympics, which is notable only because the government began cracking down on street vendors selling visibly bootlegged merchandise in the run-up to the games. But there were still stalls within markets that sold illicit movies if you knew where to look. I didn’t expect to see a copy of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 masterpiece Children of Men wedged between copies of Norbit, Transformers, and other blockbusters of that moment, but there it was, and it could be mine, for a reasonable 5 RMB (about 60¢).

As a 15-year-old, I thought the IMDB top-100 leaderboard was the epitome of cinematic taste. I volunteered that the Shawshank Redemption was my favorite film of all time and pretended to understand what was happening in Pulp Fiction. And at the time, Children of Men was ascendant. Not near the top, but as a recent film, its presence was noticed by close watchers of the list. That said, it wasn’t much of a box office hit and its themes of anarchy, government collapse, and societal unrest are all hallmarks of a film that might not make it through CCP censors. Yet here it was, against all odds.

When I put it into the DVD player at my uncle’s house, I was pleasantly surprised by how legitimate it looked. It had the full menu, including extras—although that button didn’t go anywhere. The audio and video quality of the film were indistinguishable from that of a retail copy. And this was on a Sony Trinitron television set, which was the gold standard for image quality among CRT TVs. It was the perfect setup for watching a movie containing not one, but two of the most iconic single-shot action sequences in all of cinema.

Children of Men takes place in a near-future pre-apocalyptic setting where civilization is on the brink of dissolution due to an ongoing worldwide fertility crisis. Enter Theo Faron—played by the ever-brooding Clive Owen, an activist turned bureaucrat, whose past comes to haunt him. Actually, it kidnaps him. His estranged wife Julian, played by Julianne Moore (whose red hair stands out more than ever against the film’s oppressively drab setting), is now the sole leader of the anarchist paramilitary group they co-founded. She tracks down Theo, because he’s the only man she could ever trust with a mission this important, and compels him to transport a young woman named Kee to safety.

Spoiler alert: It turns out, Kee is the first human to become pregnant in nearly two decades. Theo is to deliver her to a ship that can take her to the Human Project, a group of researchers sequestered in the Azores trying to untie this whole infertility knot. Along the way, one ambush leads to another, many deaths and injuries occur, and Kee gives birth in a migrant detention facility. A visibly injured Theo is able to get Kee and her newborn onto a rowboat and starts rowing into the foggy harbor towards a rendezvous with a ship that may or may not be coming. In one of the last shots of the film, Theo loses consciousness at the oars as a desperate Kee tries to comfort him. Roll credits.

For many years, I thought this was how the film ended: with the protagonist dying as the future of humanity hung in complete uncertainty. I rewound the video and watched it again. Same ending. I was shocked that a studio as big as Universal would allow a film meant for wide release to end on such a dismal note. It haunted me for years.

About a decade later, after Cuarón became the first Latino to win the Oscar for Best Director for Gravity and amidst an ongoing European migrant crisis, Children of Men was back in the conversation for its prescient portrayal of a callous European response to a hypothetical migrant crisis. Despite the bleakness of the ending, I remembered enjoying most of the film, so I figured I would give it another go.

The bootleg DVD was long lost to time so I rented it from Apple for $3.99 and settled into my sofa. The movie was even better than I remembered—and not just because I was streaming it in HD, although that certainly helped. Knowing where the plot twists were and when the action sequences were coming allowed me to enjoy the incredible camera work and world-building even more than I had on my first viewing. As the ending approached, I could feel my abdomen tensing up in anticipation of the big bummer. Except the ending that I thought was the ending was not the real ending.

Everything I had seen on the bootleg version was accurate, up until the final shot. Theo still loses consciousness at the oars, leaving Kee’s fate up to chance. But in the legitimate version of the movie, the ship that is meant to save Kee and her baby emerges out of the fog before the screen cuts to black and the credits roll. It was only a few seconds longer than the version I watched, but those seconds made all the difference.

I thought back to the conversations I’d had in the intervening years about how dark I thought this film was. And how confused I’d been when people told me they thought the ending was pretty hopeful. I wasn’t wrong about the film I watched, but seeing 99.9% of a film is not the same as seeing the entire thing. Now that I had, it felt like I had reconciled my own private Mandela effect and restored harmony to the timeline.

It’s tempting and perhaps all too easy to try and grasp at some kind of lesson from this series of events, but honestly, I just thought this was a silly story worth sharing. So let’s leave it at that.