IR: Never Let Me Go

Famed author Kazuo Ishiguro, respected screenwriter Alex Garland and music-video veteran Mark Romanek bring us a film in which love cannot save the day.

It was my slight misfortune to listen to a radio play some years back (I won't mention the name or that will give it away) that had a very similar concept to Never Let Me Go. You won't know the actual concept
of Never Let Me Go unless you have read the novel or spoiler-full reviews/synopses, but suffice it to say that this concept drives the film and is best kept a secret before you watch it.

Now this radio play made me aware of the true nature of the world pretty much from the first five minutes, and that tempered my experiences somewhat.
I felt a little bit 'oh, go on, get on with it' in a way which I imagine was quite unfair to the plot.
Anyway, yes.

Suffocating.

That is what this film is. Deliberately, I may add, so thats no bad thing. The film is based around the idea that the main characters in are prisoners. Not in a place, as such, even though there are boundaries on their world, but prisoners in a mindset and a system. This is in much the same way Red describes being 'institutionalised' in the Shawshank Redemption; becoming so used to the life of imprisonment that freedom itself is alien. Sometimes Not even alien, but unthinkable. An impossibility.

And unlike Shawshank, there is not redemption in Never Let Me Go. This becomes pretty clear as early as the first twenty minutes, but it does not alleviate the tension.
When I say it is suffocating, I literally felt like the story was wrapping itself round my chest and squeezing like a boa constrictor. The principle characters are caught in a loop of life, an airless, claustrophobic world in which they only have each other and those of their kind.

Their lives have been planned out before them by forces unseen. The audience will, if they are like me, be screaming with ever fibre of their being: 'ESCAPE! ESCAPE! ESCAPE!'…but they are so utterly complacent and resigned to their fate that they can no more escape than fly to the moon.

The beautiful locations such as the idyllic Hailsham school in fist act and the Aga-and-oak beam cottages in the second only serve to heighten the incestuous, inescapable loneliness of their lives. They are trapped in a world of twee routine only broken by the mildest of distractions.

At the centre of the plot is a love story, but that too is so tense and stretched you could use it to skin a drum. It starts in Hailsham where all the children are a cute as individually polished buttons, especially Chalie Rowe who plays the young Tommy. In fact they are so well turned out with apple cheeks and Loreal-ad hair that it all feels a bit Midwitch Cuckoos.

Especially with the starey eyes.
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It progresses through the next stage of life when the principles have aged into Carey Mulligan, Kiera Knightly (who deserves special mention because she is EXCELLENT in this role) and sexy sexy Andrew Garfield.

However the film does drag a little as the near-solipsistic lives of these downtrodden prisoners carries on with inevitably predictability and the end, though tragic and heartfelt, feels like going through the motions.

It is quite a relief to escape from this place, but you will not come out feeling happy.
I do have issues with the social realise of the central concept, which I won't go into here, but if you do see the film see what you think of this statement:
Does it seem to you that the writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, has made up a ghastly situation just so he can deplore of it?

3/5


Never Let Me Go was so depressing to watch. We seem to be watching a few of those recently. The characters are, without spoiling the plot too much, doomed like free range chickens. Pretty much exactly like free-range chickens, really. But you'll have to watch the film to see why. It is creepy, in a very English-apple-pie-with-arsenic-in-it way.

Eat up.

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Under strict instructions not to spoil the concept, which apparently the trailers don't so I shouldn't, it's hard to describe for you the feelings of the film or remark upon the effects upon the characters or tell you why it was so creepy to see old people walking around town or so tragic to look at porn magazines. Even more tragic than the regular reason, I mean. Suffice to say, I hope, that this film was clever and charming and intriguing and sad, and I want to see it again because the acting is beautiful and the aesthetic of the film is hauntingly wholesome.

A few criticisms; the concept, though powerful, isn't anything that's not been done before, and some aspects of it didn't stand up to analysis as to what we think would happen in a real scenario.

As for the title, think of the film as that bit in Titanic where Kate Winslet is holding on to Leonardo DiCaprio in the water, but drawn out over a decade or so.

5/5