Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Film Review: Never Let Go

What's there to be afraid of? Wouldn't you want to go see it for yourself?

In a remote house in the woods, a mother raises two kids. They have no contact with other people. This is by choice. They subsist on what they can find in the forest, but they're terrified of what could lurk out there. Whenever they walk outside, they tie themselves to a long rope whose other end is attached to the foundations of the house. As long as they're tethered to a place built from love, they can feel safe. There's no telling what might happen if they lost contact with the rope.

Never Let Go is a subtle kind of horror, one based on the anticipation of unseen things. It's no coincidence that the Bible gives "anticipation of unseen things" as a definition of faith. The mother (Halle Berry) has created a cultish dynamic in the house, constantly warning her kids about a nameless, formless evil that could devour them with a single touch without the protection of the rope. She makes them recite litanies and spend hours inside a dark box to purify their souls. It soon becomes clear that she'd have no problem killing any member of the family touched by the evil, and the dialogues establish that she has already done it more than once. Understandably, the kids are growing up in a very confused state, unsure of what they should fear more: the forest and its mysteries, or their mother and her zeal.

Several questions emerge as we learn what few bits of backstory the mother is willing to disclose. The central one in the movie is: Do you feel afraid because you're seeing monsters, or are you seeing monsters because you feel afraid? And also: Is there such a thing as loving your family too much? Are the archetypal intrafamilial betrayals (Hansel and Gretel's parents, or Cain and Abel) fated to reoccur in each generation? How do you tell when love is starting to demand too high a price? And what space is there for you to grow when the extent of your world is one person?

The child characters are far from prepared to face those questions, and the child actors convey that anxiety marvelously. Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) is the more devoted one, happy to be disciplined and eager to prove his loyalty to his mother. Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is the more curious one, willing to question arbitrary rules and investigate what the real danger is. When the family's food supply dwindles to an alarming degree, and the mother makes a desperate proposal to ensure everyone's survival, the children's opposite perspectives finally clash, and the fragility of their self-imposed isolation is shattered by uncomfortable truths.

The ever-present rope that connects this family is a powerful symbol. A rope can be a lifeline, or it can be a noose. Adhering to an invariable rule of never letting go can blur the line between staying safe and staying trapped. The mother is eventually revealed to have lacked a healthy model of parental love, and the way she's chosen to handle her own turn at parenting makes the kids' doubts justified.

The movie plays a clever game with the audience's beliefs. The dreaded evil has so far been invisible to the children; it only manifests to the mother's eyes in the shape of people she's watched die. Why don't the children see it? Is the evil merely in the mother's head, or is it playing a long game to catch her sons with their guard down? For a good stretch of the movie's runtime, both possibilities are presented as equally likely. It's immediately obvious that the mother isn't entirely reliable, but (and here's one of the oldest tricks in the horror arsenal) what if she's right? What if the world really did end in mass murder and this family is all that is left?

Later plot developments that must not be spoiled give a cruel spin to these questions. The choices that the kids make when their mother is not next to them appear to demonstrate the resourcefulness of evil. Then again, the evil that those choices express wouldn't have happened if the mother hadn't taught them about evil in the first place. Do we become tainted from simply hearing about the human imperfections? Does this mean that not even solitude in pristine nature is a refuge from the flaws of society?

Never Let Go starts as a survival movie about a mother bravely fighting to protect her children, but it gradually reaches the idea that you cannot shield children from evil forever. They will grow, and you will die. They need to learn how to face evil without you, and if you seriously try to keep them safe forever, what you're actually doing is make them your prisoners. Obsession with hidden enemies typically leads to seeing enemies in each other. He who fights monsters, etcetera.

In a scene loaded with layers of meaning, the mother explains to the kids that pictures do more than show images: they show feelings. To me, that's an invitation to not read the movie literally. This picture is not simply the story of a family hiding from a threat that ended the world. It's a picture that says that our fears don't have to be our children's fears, that what creates enemies is the very concept of enemies, and that a form of love that is unwilling to let you go is precisely the form of love you most need to let go of.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.