Carey Mulligan gives this restrained science-fiction romance its reason to be watched. Mark Romanek sometimes keeps the feelings too neatly in order, but the awkward affection between the leads is worth the patience he asks of us.
Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go asks us to care about three people who have learnt to accept what they are told. It is a good, sometimes moving film, held back by a solemnity that becomes too uniform. Alex Garland’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel puts the friendships and the love story ahead of the science fiction, a choice that works whenever the actors have room to make those relationships awkward. The trouble comes when their obedience needs more explaining than the film allows.
The boarding school matters because it gives that obedience a beginning. A child who has been taught that adults know best will not necessarily become an adult who knows how to object, and the film is persuasive about the habit of waiting for permission. Its alternative society unsettles us through the ease with which the pupils accept its rules. We do not need a chase or an uprising, but we do need to believe that each person has considered saying no.
Carey Mulligan supplies much of the missing complication as Kathy H., whose restraint never quite conceals how much she feels. Her performance keeps us interested in what Kathy H. is making of the other people, even when the direction seems determined to keep everyone equally subdued. Andrew Garfield gives Tommy D. an awkward tenderness that makes their affection convincing without making it comfortable. We were moved by their difficulty being close: the fondness is plain, and they seem painfully ill-equipped to do anything with it.
Keira Knightley, as Ruth C., helps the central trio feel worth watching even when the story is holding them at a distance. But the cast cannot always overcome the narrow range of feeling the film permits. Anger, desire and fear need to disturb the calm more often; after a while, the careful underplaying begins to make different pressures look much the same. The performances are good enough to make that restriction frustrating.
Adam Kimmel’s photography is attractive enough to become part of the problem: the boarding school remains a pleasure to look at when it ought to trouble us. Mark Digby’s production design makes it easy to believe that children could accept this place as home. That helps explain their trust, but the visual restraint keeps reassuring us that everything will remain tasteful. For a story about people accepting frightening limits on their lives, that is too comfortable a place to leave an audience.
Barney Pilling’s editing lets the performances settle, but the slow pace also gives us time to notice how little resistance the story allows. A longer pause does not always make a feeling deeper. Rachel Portman’s score fits the melancholy, though we would have preferred the music to leave more of the emotional work to the cast. Across 104 minutes, the consistency of mood becomes tiring, especially when a scene needs a different sort of energy.
As science fiction, this is unlikely to satisfy anyone who wants the workings of an alternative society examined closely. Its interest is in how people love within the lives they have been allowed, and the tentative affection between its leads gives that interest weight. We recommend it for the performances, with patience for the stretches when restraint turns into stiffness. Choose it for an evening when quiet sadness sounds welcome; it has little interest in cheering anyone up.
