The age of extinction
In the darkness there is only light
An end to their beginning, with Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, All of us
strangers, We live in time and Interstellar.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
- Dylan Thomas 1951 (features in Interstellar)1
The DNA of our ancestors runs through our blood, like a contaminated stream, their
beginning forgotten in the age of time and their end a stream light, dancing subtly in the wind.
As humanity grieves what once was, we desire to ‘rage against the dying light’ making the
embers of the flame last for eternity. And as the ashes fall and generations are reborn, our
beginning becomes forgotten as ‘old age burns’ in the dying light.
As light is dangled in front of us, drawing us closer like a moth to a flame, we rely on the
light of our ancestors, as the eternal flame burns and the ashes fall, the novels of our time are
retold and relived, until one day those fables die out and the memory of every human race
becomes forgotten. As the Neanderthals lost the memory of their race, one day we will be
forgotten in time and our legacy will become extinct. Yet the concept of grief defies this idea,
it is an event, an emotion, a feeling that lets a memory consume and burn the present day,
drawing us back to what once was and intensifying the fear of being forgotten.
This essay will explore human existence; as the eternal flame burns and the ashes fall and
recycle into the ground of the earth, our race can still be forgotten. The interdependence of
human life with light and time will be mirrored by the relationships and journeys of three
films:
‘All of us Strangers’ - Child Again? Directionless and aimless wanderings of the unloved
are destined to take us to worlds unknown. What is brought to light when emotions become
inescapable? The Lost.
‘We live in Time’ - You Again? Where connections between people are brief but no less
important. The love between people is the chain from human to human that has lasted from
the first to the last person. Why do we as humans structure our lives around the time we have
left? The Found.
‘Interstellar’ - Us Again? Parents could not imagine a time when they are not needed to help
and support their children. And yet the foundation of the universe repeats itself. To only then
begin again as the children become the parents and the cycle is linked forever. Why do we
base our lives around the crave for connection? The Return.
1
Do not go into the gentle night, Dylan Thomas, https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night, accessed
(19/08/2025)
, A light we search for
Child Again?
“As a flint-dark sky lightens to grey dawn, soft coos of rock doves clash with the kneeing of
lost gulls, crying like hungry children. But there are no more babies, no more people left, no
one at all to join in watching the stars disappear; to hold vigil until the last breath leaves the
air to cool.”2
The human race watches as the light fades, generations die out and plants regrow. Yet the
human race never escapes the cycle of grief, every person the human race has lost has been
grieved. Even the forgotten. And in this grief we return to the habits of childhood and
vulnerability is worn like skin. As humans, we grieve our past as every mistake is made and
we long for the simplicity of our ancestors, the Neanderthals had the simplest understanding
of love and expressed their ideas through the lines of art, they built the foundations of our
human life today. So when the evil elements of human life take our beloved, we grieve what
once was and grieve the generations that became lost in the human universe.
Beyond this physical universe of you and I lies a reality that defines what could’ve been if we
hadn’t lost everything we have. Grief blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, the past and
the present and life and death. It's as if the world keeps spinning yet we are trapped in a
perpetual state unable to move, frozen in time. The intensity and persistence of grief is as
permanent as the presence of light in darkness, always there but not always seen, a ‘friend in
2
Rebbecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
,the shadows’ urging us to a time when grief did not exist, to be a child again. Among all this,
light persists.
Through the doorway of an ending generation, we see the grief of our society reflected 40,000
years ago as the ‘sky lightens’ and ‘the last breath leaves the air to cool’ the light and
humanity unifies and the grief begins. This cycle is unfolded in the journey of ‘All of Us
Strangers’ where the protagonist, Adam, is transformed into another dimension, entirely
constructed by his grief, a world that runs parallel with reality and merges the real world with
the dreams of a grief stricken man. Like the Neanderthals we watch the light die and the grief
consume as an entire generation fades except for their subtle light in the void of darkness
“I suppose we don’t get to decide when it ends.” - All of us Strangers (2023)
A still from Haigh’s All of us Strangers.
I look for the light that I once had, any inkling of hope that flickers in the darkness. The half
drunk glass of wine and burnt out cigarette lay forlorn on the table. The only tangible remains
of a world forgotten. As the light settled gently upon my skin and the dust danced in the subtle
glow, my mind recreated every crack in their skin and memorised every wrinkle carved into
their faces like pencil to paper. I was an artwork without my artists, waiting to be loved for
who I once was. Stuck in an eternal loop of my past.
As the grief of our past prolongs, humanity mourns the dead and ignores the living, creating a
cycle of inevitability that sends generations to their end. ‘All of us Strangers’ acts as an
advocate of the inevitable warmth we felt through love, a feeling that sticks with us that we
can no longer have, a feeling that endures in the back of our mind, locked in eternal darkness.
The present, grieving humans become so engrossed in their loss of light that they forget our
loss as a human race and where we began. Do we really grieve the people we’ve lost or the
feeling they gave to us? The search for the dead is like the search for our ancestors, distant
and beyond our reach. They stretch into the void of space and time as we peer through the
opening of the cave to see our alternate human family, long forgotten. Remembered only by
an intricate carving in the stone, this extinct human race is almost forgotten; the Neanderthals.
, Their stars disappeared and their breaths left our world one by one, but like Adam’s parents,
they were here at the beginning and occupy the shadows of our existence.
Andrew Haigh, director of All of us Strangers, formed a raw depiction of grief and the
complexities of surviving in the world of the living whilst stuck in a world of the dead.
Through the eyes of the main character, Adam, we watch the ghosts of his parents appear as
living beings embraced by the orange light. 30 years after his parents death, Adam falls in
love with Harry, puncturing the daily rhythm of his life and forcing him back to his parents
house, in which he finds his dead parents living as usual. Their spirits embody his home. The
transfer between orange and blue light in the film, contrasts the comfort and harshness of
grief, showing the perpetual cycle he becomes stuck in, loving the spirits of his past and
rejecting the future.
As the orange light transforms into blue the audience feels the coldness of grief with Adam
just as the Neanderthals grieved their own extinction, we as an audience realize Adam's
reality was always a fantasy. The passion of love between him and his partner, creates a
picture of something so many of us long for, a love too good to be true. The perfection of their
connection forces us into the disconnection from fantasy and draws us to reality, forming the
realization that Adam's partner was never alive, he was a lost soul. The light in the darkness.
Fooled by the orange light, watching this scene we begin to question if our minds are not
limited to the one dimension of our world, could our past be reachable beyond the present day
as we yearn for what we once had? The notion that this impossibility could be real would
send us into a state of delusion, convincing us that this is the best we can ever experience. In
the scene at the table it’s as if we can reach through the screen and hold the hands of our
parents and feel a familiar connection of love. Yet, to all of us, they are strangers, not parents,
but metaphors of our memories floating in the recess of our minds combined with the
remnants of our extinct ancestors. The subtle orange light pulls us closer into a warm
embrace, a familiar feeling, a feeling of the home we once had. This fantasy of familiarity
makes reality feel superficial, a performance built to cover what really lies beneath our
facades of fake mockery and stability; shining a piercing light on the growing fragility of
humanity and generations are reborn.
A painting of light is formed throughout this film, guiding us through the journey of grief.
Like Claude Monet’s gaze on London Adam experiences the dying of the light through a
profound journey of memory and fantasy. Suffering with cataracts, Monet's perception of the
city was recreated from the window of St Thomas’ Hospital, where we see through his eyes as
they began to fail him. Like the painting we see through Adam’s eyes as his ‘sight into the
past’ seems to fail him, we question reality as reality becomes a stranger. In both scenes we
see the glow of the sun in the right side of the peripheral vision, not a direct stare but
damaging to our sight all the same. “And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes
also into you”3 Viewing this painting and Adams' story we experience a parallel journey of
light through grief, guiding us in the darkness, even if ‘we can’t see.’
3
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900, German philosopher and writer,
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00007886
, All of Us Strangers (2023) & Houses of Parliament ‘Claude Monet’ (1899-1901).
We explore the journey of light as a metaphor of grief through Adam, a man so lost in his
memories as we watch him sit under the warm orange glow from the ever turning of the earth
waiting to be a child again; to reverse time. This singular story becomes a representation of
our dying generations, as the metaphysical attachment to our past meets the fear of our
extinction putting humanity in suspension between reality and fantasy. A strobe of fiery red
becomes more than a physical light, it is a feeling that Adam clings on to, refusing to let go, a
metaphysical journey that goes beyond the universe of you and I, taking us into his intense
conflict with grief that distorts the line between reality and fantasy. When Adam feels he has
lost all he has, we are overwhelmed by the harsh contrast between a cold embracing
atmosphere pierced by harsh, angry photons perhaps representing a glint from his past among
the shadows. In the darkness do we only dream of light?
The duplicity of grief and love in this film presents a generation who mourn ‘the childhood
they never had’4 and brings us back to the simplicity of humanity built by our ancestors. We
see grief through the eyes of a child, reflecting and projecting Adams memories in a place he
longed to stay in, stuck in time. Through the lens of cinematographer Jamie D Ramsay the
scene above replays a seemingly normal dinner time conversation, glasses set out, the loving
embrace of familiarity accompanied with the half drunk bottle. Yet as the film progresses our
perspective of this scene becomes deeper and changed, we see it as a reflection of the main
character's mind, so disillusioned by grief that he sees the people he longs for the most.
Watching this film, I felt the warmth of the light, an orange tinge that cut out the coldness of
reality of who really sat around that table, filling a void of emptiness.
As Adam's mind became consumed, the fear of death grew, and centred itself at the forefront
of the film. Forcing the audience to question their own end, and emphasising that one day, like
the Neanderthals we will become extinct and our last breath will leave the air and a new
generation will consume every ounce of grief. The pure size of these fears, make us grieve our
past and long for the naivety of a child, oblivious to the approaching end.
4
Alex Needham, ‘A generation of queer people are grieving for the childhood they never had’: Andrew Haigh
on All of Us Strangers,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/29/a-generation-of-queer-people-are-grieving-for-the-childhood-the
y-never-had-andrew-haigh-on-all-of-us-strangers
, As we ‘watch the stars disappear’ and grieve as Adam did for his parents, the innocence of
childhood disappears with the stars, renewing a new generation of humanity that buries who
was once our past. Our past is constantly a ‘dying light’ urging us to hold on to our past and to
grieve what once was, breaking the barrier between our reality and fantasy. Our reality exists
as an inevitable cycle that pushes us to long for childhood and drive the past until our bitter
end where there is ‘no one at all to join in watching the stars disappear’. Yet our fantasy
removes all hardship, taking away the experiences that build us, brick by brick and avoiding
all sense of urgency that draws us closer to the day our ‘breath leaves the air to cool.’So when
you grieve the past, remember who watched the stars disappear and who felt the last breath
leave the air, remember who lost their people and their babies and see the light as a memory
of who brought us here, dead or alive, lost or forgotten because among all of this, light
persists.
In the darkness there is only light
An end to their beginning, with Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, All of us
strangers, We live in time and Interstellar.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
- Dylan Thomas 1951 (features in Interstellar)1
The DNA of our ancestors runs through our blood, like a contaminated stream, their
beginning forgotten in the age of time and their end a stream light, dancing subtly in the wind.
As humanity grieves what once was, we desire to ‘rage against the dying light’ making the
embers of the flame last for eternity. And as the ashes fall and generations are reborn, our
beginning becomes forgotten as ‘old age burns’ in the dying light.
As light is dangled in front of us, drawing us closer like a moth to a flame, we rely on the
light of our ancestors, as the eternal flame burns and the ashes fall, the novels of our time are
retold and relived, until one day those fables die out and the memory of every human race
becomes forgotten. As the Neanderthals lost the memory of their race, one day we will be
forgotten in time and our legacy will become extinct. Yet the concept of grief defies this idea,
it is an event, an emotion, a feeling that lets a memory consume and burn the present day,
drawing us back to what once was and intensifying the fear of being forgotten.
This essay will explore human existence; as the eternal flame burns and the ashes fall and
recycle into the ground of the earth, our race can still be forgotten. The interdependence of
human life with light and time will be mirrored by the relationships and journeys of three
films:
‘All of us Strangers’ - Child Again? Directionless and aimless wanderings of the unloved
are destined to take us to worlds unknown. What is brought to light when emotions become
inescapable? The Lost.
‘We live in Time’ - You Again? Where connections between people are brief but no less
important. The love between people is the chain from human to human that has lasted from
the first to the last person. Why do we as humans structure our lives around the time we have
left? The Found.
‘Interstellar’ - Us Again? Parents could not imagine a time when they are not needed to help
and support their children. And yet the foundation of the universe repeats itself. To only then
begin again as the children become the parents and the cycle is linked forever. Why do we
base our lives around the crave for connection? The Return.
1
Do not go into the gentle night, Dylan Thomas, https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night, accessed
(19/08/2025)
, A light we search for
Child Again?
“As a flint-dark sky lightens to grey dawn, soft coos of rock doves clash with the kneeing of
lost gulls, crying like hungry children. But there are no more babies, no more people left, no
one at all to join in watching the stars disappear; to hold vigil until the last breath leaves the
air to cool.”2
The human race watches as the light fades, generations die out and plants regrow. Yet the
human race never escapes the cycle of grief, every person the human race has lost has been
grieved. Even the forgotten. And in this grief we return to the habits of childhood and
vulnerability is worn like skin. As humans, we grieve our past as every mistake is made and
we long for the simplicity of our ancestors, the Neanderthals had the simplest understanding
of love and expressed their ideas through the lines of art, they built the foundations of our
human life today. So when the evil elements of human life take our beloved, we grieve what
once was and grieve the generations that became lost in the human universe.
Beyond this physical universe of you and I lies a reality that defines what could’ve been if we
hadn’t lost everything we have. Grief blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, the past and
the present and life and death. It's as if the world keeps spinning yet we are trapped in a
perpetual state unable to move, frozen in time. The intensity and persistence of grief is as
permanent as the presence of light in darkness, always there but not always seen, a ‘friend in
2
Rebbecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
,the shadows’ urging us to a time when grief did not exist, to be a child again. Among all this,
light persists.
Through the doorway of an ending generation, we see the grief of our society reflected 40,000
years ago as the ‘sky lightens’ and ‘the last breath leaves the air to cool’ the light and
humanity unifies and the grief begins. This cycle is unfolded in the journey of ‘All of Us
Strangers’ where the protagonist, Adam, is transformed into another dimension, entirely
constructed by his grief, a world that runs parallel with reality and merges the real world with
the dreams of a grief stricken man. Like the Neanderthals we watch the light die and the grief
consume as an entire generation fades except for their subtle light in the void of darkness
“I suppose we don’t get to decide when it ends.” - All of us Strangers (2023)
A still from Haigh’s All of us Strangers.
I look for the light that I once had, any inkling of hope that flickers in the darkness. The half
drunk glass of wine and burnt out cigarette lay forlorn on the table. The only tangible remains
of a world forgotten. As the light settled gently upon my skin and the dust danced in the subtle
glow, my mind recreated every crack in their skin and memorised every wrinkle carved into
their faces like pencil to paper. I was an artwork without my artists, waiting to be loved for
who I once was. Stuck in an eternal loop of my past.
As the grief of our past prolongs, humanity mourns the dead and ignores the living, creating a
cycle of inevitability that sends generations to their end. ‘All of us Strangers’ acts as an
advocate of the inevitable warmth we felt through love, a feeling that sticks with us that we
can no longer have, a feeling that endures in the back of our mind, locked in eternal darkness.
The present, grieving humans become so engrossed in their loss of light that they forget our
loss as a human race and where we began. Do we really grieve the people we’ve lost or the
feeling they gave to us? The search for the dead is like the search for our ancestors, distant
and beyond our reach. They stretch into the void of space and time as we peer through the
opening of the cave to see our alternate human family, long forgotten. Remembered only by
an intricate carving in the stone, this extinct human race is almost forgotten; the Neanderthals.
, Their stars disappeared and their breaths left our world one by one, but like Adam’s parents,
they were here at the beginning and occupy the shadows of our existence.
Andrew Haigh, director of All of us Strangers, formed a raw depiction of grief and the
complexities of surviving in the world of the living whilst stuck in a world of the dead.
Through the eyes of the main character, Adam, we watch the ghosts of his parents appear as
living beings embraced by the orange light. 30 years after his parents death, Adam falls in
love with Harry, puncturing the daily rhythm of his life and forcing him back to his parents
house, in which he finds his dead parents living as usual. Their spirits embody his home. The
transfer between orange and blue light in the film, contrasts the comfort and harshness of
grief, showing the perpetual cycle he becomes stuck in, loving the spirits of his past and
rejecting the future.
As the orange light transforms into blue the audience feels the coldness of grief with Adam
just as the Neanderthals grieved their own extinction, we as an audience realize Adam's
reality was always a fantasy. The passion of love between him and his partner, creates a
picture of something so many of us long for, a love too good to be true. The perfection of their
connection forces us into the disconnection from fantasy and draws us to reality, forming the
realization that Adam's partner was never alive, he was a lost soul. The light in the darkness.
Fooled by the orange light, watching this scene we begin to question if our minds are not
limited to the one dimension of our world, could our past be reachable beyond the present day
as we yearn for what we once had? The notion that this impossibility could be real would
send us into a state of delusion, convincing us that this is the best we can ever experience. In
the scene at the table it’s as if we can reach through the screen and hold the hands of our
parents and feel a familiar connection of love. Yet, to all of us, they are strangers, not parents,
but metaphors of our memories floating in the recess of our minds combined with the
remnants of our extinct ancestors. The subtle orange light pulls us closer into a warm
embrace, a familiar feeling, a feeling of the home we once had. This fantasy of familiarity
makes reality feel superficial, a performance built to cover what really lies beneath our
facades of fake mockery and stability; shining a piercing light on the growing fragility of
humanity and generations are reborn.
A painting of light is formed throughout this film, guiding us through the journey of grief.
Like Claude Monet’s gaze on London Adam experiences the dying of the light through a
profound journey of memory and fantasy. Suffering with cataracts, Monet's perception of the
city was recreated from the window of St Thomas’ Hospital, where we see through his eyes as
they began to fail him. Like the painting we see through Adam’s eyes as his ‘sight into the
past’ seems to fail him, we question reality as reality becomes a stranger. In both scenes we
see the glow of the sun in the right side of the peripheral vision, not a direct stare but
damaging to our sight all the same. “And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes
also into you”3 Viewing this painting and Adams' story we experience a parallel journey of
light through grief, guiding us in the darkness, even if ‘we can’t see.’
3
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900, German philosopher and writer,
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00007886
, All of Us Strangers (2023) & Houses of Parliament ‘Claude Monet’ (1899-1901).
We explore the journey of light as a metaphor of grief through Adam, a man so lost in his
memories as we watch him sit under the warm orange glow from the ever turning of the earth
waiting to be a child again; to reverse time. This singular story becomes a representation of
our dying generations, as the metaphysical attachment to our past meets the fear of our
extinction putting humanity in suspension between reality and fantasy. A strobe of fiery red
becomes more than a physical light, it is a feeling that Adam clings on to, refusing to let go, a
metaphysical journey that goes beyond the universe of you and I, taking us into his intense
conflict with grief that distorts the line between reality and fantasy. When Adam feels he has
lost all he has, we are overwhelmed by the harsh contrast between a cold embracing
atmosphere pierced by harsh, angry photons perhaps representing a glint from his past among
the shadows. In the darkness do we only dream of light?
The duplicity of grief and love in this film presents a generation who mourn ‘the childhood
they never had’4 and brings us back to the simplicity of humanity built by our ancestors. We
see grief through the eyes of a child, reflecting and projecting Adams memories in a place he
longed to stay in, stuck in time. Through the lens of cinematographer Jamie D Ramsay the
scene above replays a seemingly normal dinner time conversation, glasses set out, the loving
embrace of familiarity accompanied with the half drunk bottle. Yet as the film progresses our
perspective of this scene becomes deeper and changed, we see it as a reflection of the main
character's mind, so disillusioned by grief that he sees the people he longs for the most.
Watching this film, I felt the warmth of the light, an orange tinge that cut out the coldness of
reality of who really sat around that table, filling a void of emptiness.
As Adam's mind became consumed, the fear of death grew, and centred itself at the forefront
of the film. Forcing the audience to question their own end, and emphasising that one day, like
the Neanderthals we will become extinct and our last breath will leave the air and a new
generation will consume every ounce of grief. The pure size of these fears, make us grieve our
past and long for the naivety of a child, oblivious to the approaching end.
4
Alex Needham, ‘A generation of queer people are grieving for the childhood they never had’: Andrew Haigh
on All of Us Strangers,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/29/a-generation-of-queer-people-are-grieving-for-the-childhood-the
y-never-had-andrew-haigh-on-all-of-us-strangers
, As we ‘watch the stars disappear’ and grieve as Adam did for his parents, the innocence of
childhood disappears with the stars, renewing a new generation of humanity that buries who
was once our past. Our past is constantly a ‘dying light’ urging us to hold on to our past and to
grieve what once was, breaking the barrier between our reality and fantasy. Our reality exists
as an inevitable cycle that pushes us to long for childhood and drive the past until our bitter
end where there is ‘no one at all to join in watching the stars disappear’. Yet our fantasy
removes all hardship, taking away the experiences that build us, brick by brick and avoiding
all sense of urgency that draws us closer to the day our ‘breath leaves the air to cool.’So when
you grieve the past, remember who watched the stars disappear and who felt the last breath
leave the air, remember who lost their people and their babies and see the light as a memory
of who brought us here, dead or alive, lost or forgotten because among all of this, light
persists.
