From French director Alexandre Aja comes Never Let Go, starring Halle Berry as a mother trying to protect her sons in a post-apocalyptic world and hidden away in the woods. It’s a bit of a slow-burner for a while, while the rules of the world are established and repeated over and over again, before suddenly getting interesting and intense. However, the ending is intentionally ambiguous and complicated. And frustrating.
One of my favourite TV shows right now is From, where residents are trapped in a town they cannot leave, and must hang talismans up in the buildings at night to stop monsters from getting in and killing them. The monsters take the form of normal people, who slowly approach and try to persuade you to let them inside, so I was drawn to the similarities with that show as Never Let Go began to unfold.
Halle Berry is Momma, mom to two twin sons, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). They all live in an old isolated wooden house and every time they step outside to go looking for food, they must ensure that they have one end of a long thick rope tied around their body, with the other end secured to the house. You must never let go of the rope, it’s your lifeline. And if you do let go of the rope? Well, then the evil will touch you and make you do bad things, like it did to the rest of civilisation.
Only the sacred wood of the house built by the boys’ grandfather can protect them all and there are rhymes they recite when they leave it and return to it, all of which are drummed into us over and over again. There’s even a ritual where Momma shuts one of the boys into the sacred wooden cellar with its intricate markings on the door. While in there they must imagine the evil taking over the world and then will themselves back into the light as some kind of purification process. It’s all a bit complicated and doesn’t really help in making the plot more coherent.
The evil in question is a shapeshifter, taking many different forms – from a slithering snake to an old lady drooling black goo and with a lizard tongue. It even takes the form of the boys’ dead father, circling the house while they sleep and pleading with Momma to let him see the boys. The evil is very clever and will play on your emotions, getting inside your head to try and destroy the love you have for your family, Momma tells the boys. Although it doesn’t seem interested in the family dog, Koda, who can move around outside without a rope.
The trouble is, Momma is the only one of them who can see or hear the evil, so the boys just have to take her word for it, which eventually leads Nolan to wonder whether Momma is actually telling them the truth. Especially when nothing bad happens to them following a couple of occasions where they became untethered from the house.
The trips outside, with each family member heading in a different direction while attached to their rope, manage to keep the family fed with a very basic level of food. Grubs and insects, frogs (both freshly caught or skinned and cooked), even a squirrel taken down with the use of a catapult all make it to the plate. But a harsh winter affects their greenhouse crops – vegetation, along with the animals and insects, are slow to return, and the family meals now consist of tree bark that has been cooked in a frying pan for a while. Desperation and hunger start to drive a wedge between them all, forcing them to take drastic action.
Up until this point, it’s all been a very slow burn, with a constant hammering home of the lore. The occasional seed planted along the way keeps us wondering about what’s really going on, but nothing ever seems to develop into a very convincing story, with the vague, repetitive plot constantly threatening to derail it. But then a shocking development two-thirds into the movie ups the ante, shifting gears and beginning a much-needed period of intensity and action that had me on the edge of my seat. Unfortunately, it fails to land the ending, with its constant attempts to throw doubt on what we’ve seen just moments before. Used sparingly and cleverly, I’m usually fine with endings like that, but this was just too much and overall left me feeling disappointed and confused.
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5.7
Web developer by day, with a movie and TV watchlist that continues to grow as much as my spare time reduces! My favourite movie is Inception and, despite what everyone says, I do not have a man-crush on Tom Cruise.
