As it dawned on me that Never Let Me Go was in fact a film about young people born to have their lives cut short for the benefit of people with a lot of money, I came to accept that it wouldn’t be what I expected — and for better or for worse, I still cannot tell you. Based on the novel by Japanese Kazuo Ishiguro, adapted by English Alex Garland, and directed by American Mark Romanek, it felt strangely unbalanced. In their roles, the actors were forced to adapt to perform in a story very much outside their former experiences, and did so remarkably well. The narrative style present throughout Ishiguro’s novel was represented perfectly — and so the mix of the original author’s literary fingerprint, and the typically British acting and filmmaking techniques created an odd atmosphere; something caught in between English realism and the metaphorical intrigue of the original work.

It’s strange to imagine a world morally-permitted to harvest organs for cash, and cynics may say that it would never happen. Whether it would or wouldn’t is beside the point. As an allegory for something, watchers might take it in many different ways: a symbol for the devaluation of the individual in modern society, a look back at our human history of endless atrocities, or something else. For me, its tragedy came from the obvious point that it has been built on very real, very human ideas, and is presented with great human emotions. To witness the inevitable deterioration of the story’s protagonists was near-impossible for countless different reasons — namely that it was so painfully easy to sympathise; each character, in different ways, was simply bringing to life the fears and looming dreads we all anticipate on an everyday basis.

But the filmmakers add another ingredient to this already-powerful cocktail — the protagonists, like cattle, live in total oblivion of their bleak futures, up until a certain point anyway. In the confines of a lush and detached boarding school, they enjoy comfortable and sheltered childhoods. They form friendships, they fall in love and they become attached to the world, as we all do, and all that it has to offer us; all of which emphasise their total humanity and the wrongness and injustice of the roles that were forced upon them. As the film moves on, and as we see the three clones move across different stages in their lives, jealousies and ambitions become deep regrets and cravings for redemption. All of this is developed and delivered in such a way that the viewer is bewitched by the enchanting slowness and greyness and quiet anger — and engulfed in a piece of cinema which does well in finding all of what made the book such a strangely and pleasurably disquieting experience.

External links

Never Let Me Go at IMDb

Never Let Me Go (film) at Wikipedia

Never Let Me Go (novel) at Wikipedia

Never Let Me Go (awards won and nominated for) at IMDb