Alexandre Aja’s reputation has shifted in the years since his divisive 2004 film “High Tension”: Many genre fans have come around to recognizing his undeniable skill with set pieces and tight locations. If you don’t like “Crawl,” I don’t know what to tell you. He returns this week with another single-setting piece. However, this one has a very different tone, unfolding as a parable (or several) centered on how far a mother will go to protect her children. Maybe. Well, that, and a few other things. Aja’s directorial acumen remains top-notch, working with an ace tech team to elevate what’s a pretty muddled screenplay this time. Just as you wrap your arms around what “Never Let Go” is saying or thematically symbolizes, it slips through your fingers. A hodgepodge of mental illness, trauma, overprotection, the existence of evil, and what feels like COVID allegories, “Never Let Go” fails by virtue of its competing ideas. It leaves too little to hold on to.
“Never Let Go” unfolds almost entirely at a remote home occupied by only three people: an unnamed mother (Halle Berry) and her two sons, Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins). They have a number of rules that make the first act of “Never Let Go” feel like a variation on “A Quiet Place,” another tale of a family struggling against the evil surrounding their sanctuary. The main one is that they must stay tied to a rope connected back to their cabin when they are out foraging for food or just experiencing the outdoors. Mom tells the boys of an evil that will infect them if they leave the rope behind—whether the rope can be read as masks/vaccines for a family in lockdown during a pandemic, you decide—but only she can see this evil, one that takes the form of dead loved ones like her abusive mother and awful husband. If it gets the chance, the “evil” will infect her or the boys, keeping the trifecta trapped in a house with dwindling supplies.
Since only mom can see the horrifying creations—and kudos to the makeup team—Nolan starts questioning whether they’re real. And, at the movie’s peak, so do we. What if mom’s visions are just hallucinations brought on by years of trauma? Is this all another horror allegory for mental illness? As the trio descends further into starvation, distrust forms between the boys. Nolan starts to doubt, and Samuel stands beside Mom. It leads to a showdown over what’s really in the woods and the question of whether or not Nolan and Samuel should be more scared of it or their mom.
There are a lot of ideas in “Never Let Go,” but too many of them go unexplored. Berry said at the film’s premiere at Fantastic Fest that she hoped that it was a movie that people would be thinking about days later. Still, that’s probably a mistake because thinking too much about this movie’s themes leads to confusion.
The biggest problem is the wasted opportunity to dig into the throughline of KC Coughlin & Ryan Grassby’s script with the most potential: the possibility that mom went mad years ago. Berry doesn’t do nearly enough with this idea, going too one-note as a protective matriarch when there’s a version of this film that allows her character to be truly unsettling. She speaks of an evil that took hold of her in the real world years ago, a world she says is now gone, but we have as much reason to believe this as the boys. This character should carry trauma and potential madness in every bone and line reading, but Berry makes too many simple choices for such a complex part.
The best parts of “Never Let Go” come from Aja’s direction and his hired team to pull it off. He makes wonderful use of background movement, drawing our eye to something threatening in the woods or through a window before our protagonists see it. He’s developed a visual language with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre on films like “Crawl” and “Oxygen” that works again here. It’s a visually striking film with a tone enhanced by an effective score from Robin Coudert.
While these elements are laudable, they can’t elevate where this movie misses its mark. Or, I should say, many marks. Aja’s best films have momentum, pushing us in one direction down an increasingly speedy track. This one never builds up that pace, wasting some of its best ideas to repeat some of its shallowest. Aja will recover, probably with the in-production “Crawl 2.” By that time, we’ll all have let this one go.
This review was filed from Fantastic Fest. It’s also now playing in theaters.
