Producers: Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine and Alexandre Aja Director: Alexandre Aja Screenplay: KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby Cast: Halle Berry, Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B. Jenkins, Matthew Kevin Anderson, William Catlett, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Mila Morgan and Georges Gracieuse Distributor: Lionsgate
Grade: C-
Perhaps it was a desire to escape from the empty-headed action movies she’s been appearing in lately that induced Halle Berry to invest herself in this strange, gothic psychological horror melodrama as a change of pace. (In addition to Berry starring in it, her production company, HalleHolly, was involved in making it.) If so, it was a bad choice. “Never Let Go” is a slow, numbingly repetitious and ultimately confounding exercise in ersatz “Twilight Zone”-like mystification.
The setting is a remote house deep in the Appalachian forest (unsurprisingly, the movie was actually shot in Canada) where Berry’s character, simply called Momma, has raised her boys Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins), a pair of fraternal twins with an age difference of mere minutes. She’s inculcated in them the certainty that the world apart from the house is the abode of an inexpressible Evil that will seize them if they venture beyond its aura, so that when they go into the woods to forage for food, they must be tethered to the structure—and one another—with lengths of thick protective rope. She also leads them repeatedly in a chant that begins “Oh ancient house of sacred wood” and occasionally places them in a chamber beneath the floor to ruminate on the reality they’re dealing with.
But only she can see the manifestations of the Evil she speaks of—most notably visions of an old woman (Kathryn Kirkpatrick) in a tattered housedress, perhaps her mother, whose mouth drips oily goo as her tongue darts out like a snake’s and she accuses Momma of having poisoned her, of her husband (William Catlett), a morose man with a hole left by a shotgun blast in his back who taunts her about her boys’ impending doom, and of an old man (Georges Gracieuse), perhaps her grandfather, who built the now-deteriorating house.
Their depressingly repetitive ritual faces serious challenges. On the one hand, a harsh winter has left the greenhouse depleted and the forest denuded of wildlife, and it’s not long before the three are reduced to feasting on stir-fried tree bark. And the boys’ trust in Momma is challenged when Samuel is torn from his rope during an outing, rolls down an incline and breaks his ankle. (It’s presented as an accident, but Nolan had stepped on the rope connecting him to Samuel, perhaps intentionally, before the fall.) Momma rushes to protect the boys from the old woman whom she sees menacing them, but since they can’t share the apparition and emerge safe, their confidence in her is shaken.
Or at least Nolan’s is. Samuel, whom she nurses back to health, remains a devoted believer, but his brother has doubts, as presumably will the audience. Is Momma right about the threat she’s drilled into the boys, or is she mentally unbalanced? Even her playing “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” on their antique phonograph and bringing out a Polaroid camera and a few old photos doesn’t entirely placate Nolan, and the rift between him and Samuel comes to a head with the appearance of a hiker (Matthew Kevin Anderson), whom Nolan considers proof of normalcy beyond their home but Samuel believes a temptation created by the surrounding evil. The later intrusion of the man’s daughter (Mila Morgan) raises the stakes further, leading to a finale that literally scorches the screen but leaves lingering questions.
In many respects the film hits the mark. Jeremy Stanbridge’s production design, Eli Best’s art direction and Victoria Pearson’s set decoration make the family house a creaky, well-weathered place filled with furniture and doodads reflecting many decades past, and Carla Hetland’s worn costumes add to the mood of decay. All is bathed in the gloomy, green-and-blue tones of cinematographer Maxime Alexandre’s images, while the score by ROB (Robin Coudert) adds to the macabre atmosphere. As to the performances, Berry goes full throttle, her near-manic turn aided by the efforts of the makeup department, and director Alexandre Aja elicits exceptional work from Daggs and Jenkins.
But Aja’s efforts, as well as those of editor Elliot Greenberg, grow increasingly labored and their pacing sluggish. They try to gradually ratchet up tension and uncertainty, but maintaining suspense is difficult when you’re stretching out to feature length a narrative that, in reality, is remarkably thin, with barely enough incident to fill an hour; as a result, they resort to repeating themselves and dragging out episodes past the point of diminishing returns. That’s not to say that some individual sequences don’t work, but too many are overextended, and by the halfway point the film has grown more silly than scary. One wishes they had opted to add some intentional humor to the mix, since the unmitigated seriousness has by the end become leaden.
By the time the credits roll, “Never Let Go” has lost whatever grip it had managed to establish over viewers in the opening reel, and doesn’t provide the successful change of pace Berry was presumably hoping for.