Rating – ***1/2 (3.5/5)
Never Let Go
Cast: Halle Berry, Anthony B. Jenkins, Percy Daggs IV
Directed by: Alexandre Aja
In theaters
“If the evil touches you, it makes you do bad things”, – when you hear lines like this, it is easy to connect them to the famed fables that our grandmoms or great-grandmoms would narrate to us when we were infants. It instills a sense of fear and at the same time, awareness which is always the intention anyway. Never Let Go tries to do the same but goes beyond the world of fables into what is a bleak yet eerie world comprising of questions that intentionally remain unanswered.
It is rare when you have Halle Berry in a film but she has an unnamed character. We will call her Mama Berry because that is exactly what she does – mothers her two boys to protect them from the ‘evil’ that only she can see. The rope they tie themselves to is the only way they can stay safe as it ties them to the safe house that was built where the supposed evil cannot enter or harm them. Living away from what is constantly told as ‘no one out there in the world’, Mama Berry gets these alleged hallucinations of evil which she wants to save her boys from.
And just like any sibling duos you will find, the two boys belong to sides of the spectrum. Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) blindly follows what her mother asks him to do and never questions if the evil she is talking about is even real or not. On the other hand, there is Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), the more practical and questioning kid who doesn’t entirely buy what her mother is saying but still follows her to an extent.
Director Alexandre Aja is able to create a world that instantly makes you claustrophobic and uncomfortable – and that is ironic because the cabin in these woods is as open to nature as it can be. But the lack of any other human presence and about 60 to 70 minutes of the film relying only on three humans who live on a day-to-day basis is as dreadful a thought as it can be.
The post-apocalyptic feel, the rusted house, killing animals and even extracting the bark of a tree to feed themselves add to the disdain and thus make an impact furthermore. Never Let Go is by no means your quintessential horror ride and except for maybe a few jump scares, it is entirely psychological. The setting plays a huge role and with masterful sound design and visual representation, it is accentuated even more.
The film does take a while to get going, especially the first half hour and the necessary chapter treatment doesn’t help its chances. But once it catches some speed and introduces some unanticipated twists, it gets better. Without revealing too much, the makers and Halle Berry deserve special applause for mounting a film on two kids for the majority of the film.
And as we talk about the two kids – they are as phenomenal as child actors can be – to be able to understand the intricacies of a dreary world and work with imagination might seem like a mature thing to do which even adult actors struggle to crack but these two boys deserve all the applause for doing that. And Berry is fantastic too. She becomes the anchor for you to lead to a story that transpires into perplexing but exciting possibilities.
Never Let Go ends on a note which makes the experience even better because the questions you perhaps had when you began watching the film remain unanswered but not in a way that the screenplay isn’t able to do justice but in a way that plays with your mind and makes you wonder everything. The film does suffer with its pacing but the forgivable runtime about a 100 minutes helps the cause and it ends up being a much more fulfilling experience.