ZPG (Zero Population Growth) (1972)

“Smog covers the Earth. The oxygen is depleted. Love is encouraged but the penalty for birth is death.”

The population of the near future – described as “a few days after the day after tomorrow” –  live a dull, empty existence in smog-blanketed cities with their minds dominated by television. Meanwhile, technology has wiped out vegetation, birds and animals.

Everywhere the air is thick with honey-throated voices soothing endless lines of people through shopping malls, museum galleries and smog-choked streets.

The government of the world has placed a 30-year ban on conception in an effort to achieve Zero Population Growth (ZPG) and save what’s left of life on earth.

Instead of real babies, everybody is entitled to visit the baby shop and get themselves their very own animatronic child.

Any citizens ignoring the ban and concealing illegal children are caught and executed – the babies too – and informers are rewarded with food chits.

When a baby is discovered in this future society, the authorities swoop and the offending parents and baby are placed inside a large portable dome.

They are forced to stay under the dome for 12 hours to contemplate their transgressions, then executed – facing death by suffocation – inside it.

It’s a world of plastic food and simulated merriment – and a museum to contain the last living remnants of Earth’s natural flora and fauna.

The caretakers of that museum, Russ (Oliver Reed) and Carol McNeil (Geraldine Chaplin) are a young couple who represent the last living link with today’s humanity. The last holdouts for individuality in a sterile, bland future.

Carol contrives to defy the anti-conception edict and illegally conceive, and Russ decides to back his wife on this suicidal plan.

He is almost caught at a computerised library trying to look up childbirth procedures, but the couple takes a child doll as camouflage and prepares a secret room in their fallout shelter to house their baby.

Russ hides Carol down in the shelter for five months and tells anyone who asks that his wife left him.

Once the child is born, Carol and Russ’s neighbours Edna (Diane Cilento) and George (Don Gordon) discover their secret and reveal their psychotic side, demanding firstly to hold the baby, then to share it, and ultimately to take it away for their own.

Realising it is just a matter of time before they are discovered, Russ and Carol have secretly planned their escape.

They have figured out where they will be executed and stored their escape gear underground, below the execution spot.

When the inevitable happens, and the dome descends, Russ has a digging tool strapped to his ankle and burrows down to the sewer tunnels where their raft awaits for them to paddle off into the sunset.

They alight without provisions or shelter on a (possibly radioactive) prohibited island, where a placard announces that Polaris missiles were buried as part of a 1978 peace accord.

The film, made in Copenhagen with an English-speaking cast, has a dreamlike quality enhanced by the slowly drifting pollution clouds and silent, grim-faced crowds.

Russ McNeil
Oliver Reed
Carol McNeil
Geraldine Chaplin
George Borden
Don Gordon
Edna Borden
Diane Cilento
Dr Herrick
David Markham
Mary Herrick
Sheila Reid
President
Bill Nagy

Director
Michael Campus