‘Never Let Go’ Review
Stars: Halle Berry, Anthony B Jenkins, Percy Daggs IV, Kathryn Kirkpatrick | Written by KC Coughlin, Ryan Grassby | Directed by Alexandre Aja
The latest film from French horror director Alexandre Aja (Piranha 3D, Crawl) is an evil-in-the-woods mystery chiller that’s intent on keeping the audience guessing until the end. As such, it has its moments, thanks to strong performances by the two young leads, but it’s never as satisfying or as scary as it ought to be.
Never Let Go takes place in a remote wooden house in the forest, where Halle Berry’s Momma (the character is never named) is raising her two young, non-identical twin boys Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B Jenkins), apparently in the wake of some apocalyptic event that has befallen the rest of the country. Accordingly, Momma tells the boys that if they leave the house, they must remain tied to it via a length of thick rope, otherwise The Evil will get them and make them turn on each other.
Sure enough, when one of the boys accidentally comes loose from his rope, we see a slavering, pale-skinned woman with a black forked tongue (Kathryn Kirkpatrick) come out of the ground and chase him, but apparently only Momma can see her. So is The Evil all in her head? Or is everything she says true?
The script – by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby – throws the audience in at the deep end, maintaining a sense of mystery over what’s really going on. For the first half, the boys take Momma at her word, but tension arises when a situation with the family dog forces Nolan to challenge his mother for the first time, with Samuel caught in the middle.
In fairness, Aja knows his way around a jump scare, and there are some effectively tense sequences, as well as a commendably unexpected story decision that the audience probably won’t see coming. The problem is that because of the nature of the storytelling, The Evil isn’t clearly defined, so we’re never quite sure just how scared we’re meant to be at any given point.
On top of that, Never Let Go becomes rather one-note at a certain point, as the audience effectively waits for the script to commit itself one way or the other. As a result, the ending fails to satisfy and feels like it has wasted some of its potential.
On the plus side, Berry delivers a committedly frazzled performance and the two child actors are both terrific, effectively earning the film its third star on the virtue of their performances alone. Both Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B Jenkins are convincingly, heart-breakingly vulnerable, to the point where you suddenly realise that the entire film is an extended allegory for the perils of leaving home and going out into the big, bad world, with Berry as the over-protective mother who has already experienced a catastrophic degree of loss in her family.
In short, Never Let Go is a watchable Friday night horror flick that just about succeeds thanks to the quality of its performances, but it’s also derivative and repetitive, while lacking the ability to truly terrify.
*** 3/5
Never Let Go is in cinemas now.
