From the left: Anthony B. Jenkins as Samuel, Halle Berry as Momma and Percy Daggs IV as Nolan in Never Let Go.Liane Hentscher/Lionsgate/Lionsgate
Never Let Go
Directed by Alexandre Aja
Written by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby
Starring Halle Berry, Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV
Classification 14A; 140 minutes
Opens in theatres Sept. 20
In the wake of quietly tense dystopian thrillers like Bird Box, Leave the World Behind, and A Quiet Place franchise dominating both box office and streaming platforms, it makes sense that audiences might be growing somewhat tired of minimalist post-apocalyptic horror. It’s refreshing, then, that French genre veteran Alexandre Aja is at the helm at the industry’s latest instalment in that vein, Never Let Go.
Starring horror favourite Halle Berry as the mother of two young boys, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), the Crawl and High Tension director’s newest film sets us within familiar narrative territory – living in a secluded cabin in the lush but ominously remote wilderness, the family takes painstaking precautions to avoid an unseen evil that has destroyed the world beyond them and threatened their family for generations.
The boys’ mother tells them frequently of the family lore: decades earlier, their grandmother became aware of a frighteningly evil force closing in on their family home and developed rituals, now passed down to her daughter and grandchildren, to protect her and her family as best she could. Berry’s character fiercely guards her sons, instilling them with the knowledge of these practices with a domineering yet necessary force.
Samuel, the older of the boys, is quick to both believe and heed his mother’s regular warnings, never straying from the umbilical-like rope that each family member must tie around him- or herself in order to keep safe while foraging for game in the sinister woodlands that surround their home. Likewise, he believes without a doubt in the family cabin’s ability to guard them from evil – above anything else, his mother is adamant that the wood that makes up parts of their dwelling – a well-worn bedside table, an intricately engraved door frame, and, especially, a cellar trap door in the heart of the house – acts as a defensive shield for the family.
Nolan, on the other hand, is the more precocious of the pair and often tests the limits of his mother’s rules with his more curious and challenging nature. Given that she is the only one to have seen the threatening, monstrous forms that the evil takes, the young boy’s inquisitive mind can’t help but become more and more doubtful of the reality that she has told them for years that they live in.
When the family’s food stock finally depletes and his mother suggests a taboo food source for the trio in order to survive, Nolan’s tinderbox of skepticism finally ignites, setting into motion a series of events that – after a lifetime of uncertainty – definitively show each of the boys the true nature of the world they live in.
While screenwriter duo Coughlin and Grassby struggle a bit in finding the balance between building out a clear and polished story world while maintaining a high-tension ambiguity, Never Let Go is replete with fantastic sound design, a perfectly tense, synth-heavy score by French composer ROB (of Coralie Fargeat’s 2017 film, Revenge, and Osgood Perkins’s 2020 Gretel & Hansel), and refined work from cinematographer and long-time Aja collaborator, Maxime Alexandre.
As such, it’s a film that is undoubtedly made to be seen in cinemas and only further buoyed by young actors Jenkins and Daggs, both of whom carry the film with vulnerable performances that move with surprising ease between the innocent wonder of childhood and the heavy weight of facing an evil so insidious, so beyond their limited experience in the world, that it threatens their very family bonds themselves.
While not all of Aja’s narrative threads come together in the film’s final act (its ending seems crafted to elicit more questions than answers), it is the director’s polished technical work and deft weaving of themes – here, intergenerational grief and the potential violence of imagination – alongside a lush but dreadful sense of atmosphere and looming danger that shape the film’s most engaging moments.
Unlike the metaphorical ruminations of its peers – often conveniently back-loaded with a high-concept villain – Never Let Go does its best work when in service of its supernatural reckoning, effectively blurring the line between what might be the real and what may be the hallucinatory.