Never Let Me Go

Directed by Mark Romanek,  showing at the Arts Picturehouse from Friday 11th February

[rating: 3/5]

If an English sci-fi film (set in a mythical 1970s) that overdoses on melancholy gets your pulse racing, then you’ll just love Never Let Me Go.

Based on the superb book by Kazuo Ishiguro, it traces the lives of friends Kathy, Tommy and Ruth from their time on the green-fresh fields of Hailsham School to the bitter adult world outside. This is not a cinematic bildungsroman for the jolly, as we soon learn that the children are raised for some darksome purpose (shudder). I don’t want to give the game away as quickly as the film does, but let’s just say it’s like a romantic Jeepers Creepers– without the adrenaline rush.

Throughout the book Ishiguro carefully and very gradually drops the clues until suddenly they explode like firecrackers into dreadful delayed realisation. But the film explains all in a giddying pop right at the beginning and far too soon for my liking. However, it does weave its symbols subtly and these give the scenes a visual poetry that the story-telling otherwise lacks: a spray of water on a wilting rose, withered dolls and a dog-eared ‘snakes and ladders’ board.

Fleeting performances from Sally Hawkins and Charlotte Rampling are excellent but both actors are underused. Rampling, as the head, Miss Emily, is electric: her heavy lids shade ice-blue eyes which flicker with an eerie warmth to pull you in, popcorn and all. The young trio of child actors are astonishingly still and give intense performances but the shockwaves of the plot-bomb detonated so early on at Hailsham, fail to resonate deeply enough throughout the rest of the struggling 70 minutes.

The grown-up children played by Carey Mulligan (Kathy), Keira Knightley (Ruth) and Andrew Garfield (Tommy) come across as fully-fleshed characters because these actors are masters of conveying passion in few words. Mark Romanek’s directorial attention to the performances is beautifully detailed.

Kathy, through choice, is spared from the melancholic virus of the central theme and it is her purposeful perspective and Mulligan’s performance that gives the film some much needed credibility.  However, the choices made within the screenplay of how to manage the untangling of the lives of the three protagonists lack cohesion and the build-up of tension is negligible.

The delicate patina of pastel tones, employed skilfully by the cinematographer (Adam Kimmel) during the first half, offers little relief in the second, as the hues slide into a dulled monochrome: scenes of muddy cottages and dreary beach resorts take over as the children morph into young adults. The remainder of the film trickles on. Momentarily, spurts of sexual tension are injected and stabs of viciousness resuscitate it. These moments pump much-needed blood into a film only to let it slump back etiolated as it staggers ten years down the line.

Even the score, which at one point undercuts the film with a mournful plucking of a harp, reminded me of the film’s self-conscious attempt to play the viewer’s own heart strings. The film is littered with too many far-out-to-sea gazes that look as though the character is simultaneously pondering Dignitas and observing a waltzing pigeon. Ultimately the soggy exposition and pace maim what should be a soul-wrenching web of love and loss.

The book made me reflect on the ethics of dangerous experimental science, the fragility of human existence and all that philosophical shizzle, but the film, begging me to never let it go, had the opposite effect: I couldn’t wait to join the true madness of reality.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIMr15_aRAg