Never Let Go is a 2024 American survival horror film directed by Alexandre Aja, and the cast includes Halle Berry, Percy Daggs, Anthony B. Jenkins, and Will Catlett.
In Never Let Go, we have Halle Berry playing a mother trying to protect her twin sons in a post-apocalyptic world, where they live in isolation and must follow strict rules, the most important being to always stay connected to their home with a rope.
If they disconnect, they're vulnerable to an evil force that only she can see. She warns her sons that they won’t see it until they’re older, which makes one of them, Nolan, start to question her and tensions arise.
Like a lot of horror movies in recent years, such as The Babadook and Hereditary, Never Let Go leans on mental illness as a central theme.
In the film we see Momma (Halle Berry) may have inherited a mental illness that distorts her view of reality, as her mother also suffered from the same condition, believing the world was being taken over by an evil force, which led her to hide the family in a house deep in the woods.
When Momma begins to experience similar symptoms, she follows her mother's beliefs, bringing her young sons to the same house to escape the imagined danger, and this traps them in her distorted reality.
The film attempts to portray mental illness to show how her mind creates misinformation, affecting how she sees and understands the world.
I have to say, I was quite impressed with the small cast, as the performances are pretty decent.
Halle Berry brings a decent portrayal of a mother struggling to care for her kids while dealing with the trauma from her past, and the two sons, Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV also put in decent performances, especially in the latter part of the movie.
The biggest problem though is as the story unfolds, the movie does become very messy, especially after a certain twist, that leads to a somewhat confusing narrative and a plot that needs better direction.
The mix of serious themes with horror elements just doesn’t quite work, and leaves it all feeling uneven and the movie ultimately loses its way, making it hard to stay engaged by the end as it all becomes too messy as it just tries to juggle a bit too much.
While Never Let Go attempts to show a mother's struggle and the mental impact of being isolated, it never really fully explore these ideas, and add in some strange character shifts and plot points and rules that sometimes do not make sense, you end up with a film where you can see what it was trying to do, it just wasn't executed very well.
The films attempt to surprise those watching, but really it’s just a straightforward story with a limited setup, because with only three characters and not much else going on, there’s little to keep things interesting.
[Never Let Go on IMDB] [Where to watch Never Let Go]
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