There is something intriguing yet exasperating about Never Let Me Go, a strange, muted film adapted by screenwriter Alex Garland from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel and directed by Mark Romanek.
It’s a classy and composed British drama, with hard-back cinema production values, based on a premise that has already been extensively explored by genre and science-fiction writers.
This premise is disquieting, though Never Let Me Go may be too tasteful to be scary and yet too contrived and unreal to be tragic. And it has to be said that there is sometimes a fashion-shoot quality to the styles and visual compositions.
Being scary or tragic may not be the point, though. Where Never Let Me Go succeeds is in being a dreamlike parable of Britishness — a particularly miserable Britishness, a Britishness that submits numbly and uncomplainingly to authority, a pinched Britishness with an unshakable loyalty to unhappiness and, with the coming of death, regards not raging against the dying of the light as some grim sort of social or municipal obligation. Never Let Me Go reminded me of Winston Smith’s wife in Nineteen Eighty-Four, joylessly insisting that marital sex was “our duty to the party”.
Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley play Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, who have grown up together in a boarding school in a kind of alternative-reality England, which, but for occasional touches of modernity, could be the late 1940s or early 1950s.
The children are being groomed for a special, self-sacrificial destiny in this weirdly Sovietised society and when they realise what that destiny is, it is to have far-reaching repercussions for their relationship, which becomes a distorted love triangle.
The secret purpose the government has assigned to them is not revealed with the flash of drama, horror or vertigo that it might have been given in conventional sci-fi treatments. In story-telling terms, this is a bit disconcerting. But the very point is perhaps that it is humdrum, workaday, embedded in the tatty fabric of everyday life and just something else to be depressed about.
The secret — hidden in plain sight — is mysterious, horrifying and yet accepted: it is like death itself, that drab fact in all our lives that is just as mysterious and horrifying and yet treated by all of us, every day, with a fatalistic, unthinking shrug.
In spite of the heavy weather, Never Let Me Go never delivers a cloudburst of emotion or revelation and yet it has ideas and lingers in the mind. — Guardian News and Media 2011