REVIEW: Never Let Me Go (dir. Mark Romanek)

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling

Kathy (Mulligan), Ruth (Knightley), and Tommy (Garfield) have grown up together at Hailsham, a remote boarding school in 1970s England. The children are electronically tagged and forced to take an assortment of pills with their morning bottle of milk. The quaint picket fences are hardly cage walls, but the rumours of what happens to children that cross them are more powerful a deterrent than any physical barrier. With no access to the outside world, the children’s flaws and anxieties breed uncontrollably. Tommy is a shy and clumsy boy given to sudden fits of howling rage; Kathy is an introverted girl, too kind and open for her own good, who befriends Tommy out of pity; Kathy’s ‘friend’ Ruth is a prissy little madam who, desperate to remain the centre of attention, decides she is in love with Tommy and begins a relationship with him that lasts into young adulthood. With nowhere to go, Kathy is forced to follow the handsome couple around like some meek and forlorn maid.

But Hailsham is no normal boarding school, and this is no normal 1970s England. Romanek’s film, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel, is set in a dystopian world where people are cloned and raised in isolated schools so that the state can use them for various barbaric procedures. As our beloved trio mature into young adults, they are transported to a farm where they can be kept, healthy and innocent, until their time arrives. They meet youngsters from the other schools dotted around the country, and hear rumours that in certain situations, couples that can prove they are in love are granted a stay of execution. Can Kathy and Tommy come to terms with the love that they have both been skirting around for their entire lives? Can Ruth release her poisonous grasp and allow some glimmering hope to survive? Is there any future for these “poor creatures”?

Alex Garland’s haunting adaptation remains faithful to Ishiguro’s tense and complex source material. The film manages to weave between genres and tones, leaving the viewer with a chilling and unshakeable sense of unease. Those who are unfamiliar with the source material (and who watched the film before reading this review) will be shaken to the core by the revelation that this school is little more than a farm for human organs. The hints that Garland has placed throughout the opening section reverberate back through the brain like shockwaves from a trauma, or flashbacks to a nightmare: the head teacher’s propagandist speeches about how Hailsham students are “special”; phrases like “originals” and “completion”; and those damned electronic tags and pills before breakfast, it all takes on a stark and harrowing clarity.

As we have come to expect from Mark Romanek, the film is beautiful and the tone expertly conveyed – with sweeping, melancholic landscapes, twilight hues, and brooding shadows – but the attention to small visual details is what elevates this literary adaptation into the realm of superb filmmaking. The texture and aesthetic of the film perfectly reflects Kazuo’s writing – elegance and truth, gentle, fragile, minimal simplicity.

Mulligan is the lynchpin of this film; her doe-eyed softness and melancholy smile perfectly encapsulating our heroine. Caring and patient characters are often inactive and dull, but Mulligan does an excellent job of imbuing Kathy with yearning purpose. Kathy’s narration of the film is by no means impartial, and we hear the entire story through the lens of her lingering resentment and unsteady, helpless passion. Andrew Garfield is also excellent in the role of Tommy. He is a boy that spends his life trying not to look at the things that make him scream – it is a simple and powerful root, and Garfield grasps it firmly and elicits a stirring performance.

A criticism that has been levelled at the story is the question of why the characters don’t just run away. They are allowed to live in relative freedom, even after leaving behind the picket fences of Hailsham, and could technically escape if they so wished. But this is a thoughtless and immaterial suggestion, because in real life, people rarely escape. People did not flee Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht; thousands of abused spouses remain in shivering domestic hell for their entire lives; and out-of-luck gangsters choose to fight for their meagre territory rather than fleeing town, because it is all they know. In real life, people accept their lot. We live in small worlds and we don’t have the perspective needed to rebel. And after all, what would they have been escaping into? “We all end up dying. And none of us really understand what we’ve lived through. Or feel we’ve had enough time.