Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go, director Mark Romanek’s film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s critically acclaimed novel of the same name is a mixed bag of passionate and detached emotion. Narrated by Cathy (Carey Mulligan) and telling the story of her life with Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Never Let Me Go spins a tale set in an alternative Britain where genetic research and cloning are vastly more advanced and more accepted than they are in reality. It is a disquieting premise which has been extensively explored over the years and I was intrigued to see what ideas this film opens up.

Never Let Me Go follows the lives of three children who were cloned so that once they had reached adulthood they could have their organs harvested for the good of others. These children are brought up in isolation from the outside world and are therefore innocent of their purpose. The film explores the ethics of using real people in this way, and how far we should take these technologies just because we have the ability.

Not having read Ishiguro’s book I cannot tell whether some of the issues I had with Never Let Me Go were problems with the story itself or with the adaptation, but I found that there were aspects which didn’t sit right. The relationship between Cathy and Tommy for example was puzzling; Cathy has supposedly been in love with him since childhood, and the impression I got was that he felt the same way. Why then did he spend years as Ruth’s boyfriend, why did this behaviour not affect Ruth’s feelings for him, and why did they not seek each other out, choosing to spend years lonely before being reunited by accident?

Another problem I had was that once the children, who had previously thought that they were destined for great things, found out that they were going to die, they simply accepted it. The film portrayed the crushing sadness of the inevitability of death, the certain knowledge of when and how they were going to die, and the desperate clinging on to love in a wonderfully heartbreaking way. The muted tone of the whole film felt as though life never truly begins for these children, and instead felt like orchestrated snapshots. Having said that, there was no sense of fight or of vibrancy which, since the argument was that these humans were really people, you would expect to be the point.

Despite this, Never Let me Go was a beautifully produced film which held me in thrall all the way through. The questions which I raised above only occurred to me once I had left the cinema, since the bittersweet tone of the film completely sucked me in. The sweetness of love spoiled by this horrific not-so-secret secret which is so unquestioningly accepted was one of the saddest things I have seen in a while. Tommy’s scream of rage and pain towards the end typifies this film for me - anger and despair mingled with utter hopelessness. A sad, bizarre and frustrating film which had many successes in portraying this subject in a new way but didn’t quite hit the mark.

See Never Let Me Go at City Screen, York. Check out the cinema's website for times and further details.

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