Cinema 2011 #16: Never Let Me Go

Ah, the future. If the cinema is to be believed, it’s not going to be a pretty picture. Fewer hover boards and 70s style unisex jumpsuits, a lot more death by aliens, death by natural apocalypse, death by ill-advised and worryingly self-aware technology not spurned by ctrl + alt + del, death by nuclear holocaust, death by religious fanatics, death by rampaging red-neck cannibals who can’t find a tin opener, death by zombies, but then coming back as zombies and causing more death. All in all, in the future, you’ll be dead. But when it comes to Never Let Me Go, you’ll get to live a little bit longer before you complete that final journey.

Based on the arresting and sombre sci-fi novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go is the story of three adults, self-identifying Donors, and their relationships with each other from childhood till their late 20s. Kathy H., played by Carey Mulligan, narrates the story of how she, Tommy D. (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth C. (Keira Knightley) grew up in a sheltered and isolated English boarding school called Hailsham in the late 1970s. This all takes some 20 years after an unspecified breakthrough in medical science has dramatically increased the lifespan of everyone on the planet to over 100 years. 

 Happy Keira

The cast represents the emerging stars of British cinema, with Garfield making the greatest impact as the conflicted Tommy, lending him a charmingly lanky clumsiness and searing fits of rage. Our own Domhnall Gleeson shows a nuanced desperation as a striving Donor, and Andrea Riseborough achieves what so few actors are capable of, a realistic Irish accent. Keira Knightley, however, fails to fuse with Ruth, flip-flopping between her Janus like faces of brittle anguish and pixyish gurning - frankly, you get more range from an Aga.

 Sad Keira

It doesn’t take an expert to figure out what Donations these Donors are making, and that is where the film goes wrong. The book handles the subject matter with simplicity and vagueness, slowly unveiling a horrifying truth by allowing the reader to figure things out themselves, in a sense becoming as implicit in the whole sordid scheme as a recipient. It paints the picture of Donors so readily conditioned to accept their fate, that the notion of legging it à la Logan never even occurs to them, and that when Tommy and Kathy seek out a deferral on their contributions, it is because they specifically want time together, not time itself. The film instead is forced to make things a lot simpler, taking the plot under the microscope and zooming in with mitochondrial magnitude.

Some things work; Rachel Portman’s score is hauntingly sad and Rachael Fleming’s costume work captures a true sense of hand-me-down wear and tear. The art direction offers up vistas of bleak seaside landscapes and concrete Brutalist architecture that sums up the sense of future in a knowing 1980s way. But the greatest disappointment here is how soulless the film is, failing to truly grip the audience with a story that is devastatingly sad.

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