Never Let Me Go* Review

Provocative in its lack of provocation, Never Let Me Go is a thoughtful, subtle and profound piece of cinema.

Suffused in desolate sadness, Never Let Me Go is a disquieting journey through the bleak midwinter of the human soul.

Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, it has been adapted for the screen by The Beach author Alex Garland with a sympathetic feel for tone and texture. And it marks a triumphant return to directing for Mark Romanek, after eight years in the wilderness.

England in the 1970s, a society stuck beneath grey skies somewhere between the old world and the new. At Hailsham, students are reminded that they’re ‘special’, but the fences that enclose them and the guards at their gate strike an unsettling note.

These children are clones, created to donate their organs as young adults and eventually reach ‘completion’. Hailsham is the acceptable face of barbarity: a grotesque parody of childhood, education and care.

It’s here that Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Kathy (Carey Mulligan) form a friendship that will come to define their lives. After they leave Hailsham, they will get a brief taste of life on the threshold of death. And they will come to understand in their own ways what it means to be truly human, with its attendant tragedies, betrayals and rare, precious moments of transcendence.

Romanek and his production team have fashioned an exquisitely moving film that revels in the precise artifice of cinema – composition, framing, light and editing – but which demonstrates the artist’s flair for emotional connection. Inspired by Japanese Noh drama, Romanek’s formal rigour belies the pain, loss and solitude shifting like oceanic currents beneath the surface.

The passions that ignite between the three friends are a heartbreaking contrast to the repressive monotony of the country at large. Glimpsed from car windows or through café doors, the world that denies them is a place of dormancy and decay – one indesperateneedoftheirlife,lustandjoy.Aboveall else,NeverLetMeGoisastoryoftragicwaste.

It is also a showcase for a new generation of English actors, led by Carey Mulligan, who proves once again that she is a performer of great restraint and subtlety. An ungenerous reading might suggest that Kathy’s passivity in the face of tragedy, perhaps even her collusion in it, betrays her own essential inhumanity. But it’s her grace, her acceptance of life and her determination to experience fully those moments she has that speaks to the best part of our nature.

Close your eyes for a moment and listen, and it’s possible to hear the agonised cry for help buried at the film’s core, but that anguish never breaks the surface. Its restraint is a challenge – we’re conditioned to expect some sort of cathartic resolution founded in anger and revenge – but Romanek doesn’t offer us that release. Instead, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy find solace in forgiveness.

And what could be more human than that?