Never Let Me Go

To write about Never Let Me Go is to be very careful not to spoil it for anyone who might still plan on seeing it.

Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Kathy (Carey Mulligan) grow up in an English boarding school in 1978, even though the aesthetics of the film have a distinct feel of the 1950's. Their idyllic upbringing is only disturbed by the mundane aches and pains that inevitably accompany teenage life. When a new teacher arrives, a horrible secret, which hitherto has been hidden in plain sight, is revealed to the children and will alter their life from hereon. Here the film which up until now has felt like a perfectly English countryside love story or period drama, albeit an unhappy one with a sinister undertone, develops an unexpected turn into the science fiction domain, this being as far as I will venture into discussing the plot in this review.

The rhythm of the film is clean and slow, including a few dead spaces which even though they may seem self-indulgent at first later on prove their value as the crux of the film, the secret, has time to slowly unfold its magnitude on the audience. The film itself is a plain metaphor for the inevitability of death, its omnipresence and our horrified, yet resigned acceptance of it. The characters' acquiescence to the, and yet quiet despair facing 'the fact', does  nothing but mirror man's eternal struggle to abide facing his /her own dreaded and yet strangely insignificant demise.

The film's love-triangle cleverly reinforces this awfully objective logic of a world in which subjectivity is by no means a god-given, or man-given right. On this level, the film does play on class distinction as well, even if it does so with less subtlety than one could hope for. On the other hand, Never Let Me Go manages that tightrope between sensationalistic depiction of the secret and just plain boredom remarkably well, avoiding any emotional cliches or too blunt implications. It is, however, the last scene of the film which is of such heart-breaking beauty and understatement that will convince you entirely of the film's merit. 

Never Let Me Go manages to portray that well-trodden path about the injustice and the absurdity of the human condition in a way which is at once original and aesthetically nostalgic, in depicting a world in which the surrounding is not only unbearably indifferent to the human plight, but also of a delicate beauty which might just convince you to forgive it.