Never Let Me Go

I am a writer by (wanna be) trade, mostly because I feel things so strongly and can feel I will explode if I don't give the feelings a venue to come out, and writing has been gracious enough to me to be that venue.

Because I write under emotion, I am always looking for things to stir up emotions in me; happiness, sadness, empathy, anger even. Any strong emotion, no matter the kind, will make me want to write.

It's taken me a long time, as in roughly 28 years, to really figure how my emotions and writing correlate, or at least it's taken me 28 years to figure out a healthy way to seek out emotion and then allow that emotion to flood out into words written down.

This is a long and personal introduction to a movie review I know, but I felt it necessary to explain before I start Never Let Me Go.

I first saw this movie years ago, not long after it first came out. Back then, I didn't know how to properly use my emotions to write, or maybe I didn't properly know how to emotion. In any case, I felt a lot of emotions strongly about this film, and decided to label my emotions as anger and declare that this movie was rubbish.

On a whim, with an afternoon to myself today, I found Never Let Me Go again on Netflix and decided to see if I still hated it six years later.

I would have written this review two hours ago, but I've been too busy writing a short story because this movie, this beautifully haunting piece of work, made me feel so many emotions I had no choice but to write.

Never Let Me Go, starring Kiera Knightley, Andrew Garfield, and Carey Mulligan, is a dystopian story focused on three characters as they struggle to gain clarity and control over their lives. The story is set in a world where medical science has allowed for people to live well over 100 years old, but at the price of creating clones who will give up their bodies (called Completing) in order that others might live.

The story focuses on Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Kiera Knightley), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), all three clones who are set to become donors and Complete (die) in their 20's. The three meet at a boarding school for clones and form a friendship. When Ruth sees a budding romance forming between Kathy and Tommy, she steps in and claims Tommy as her own, creating a permanent strife against Kathy. However, the three remain close friends, and eventually graduate from the school and go to live in a farm cottage with several other clones.

While living at the cottages, the three's friendship begins to unravel, with it becoming more and more apparent that all three know that Tommy and Kathy should truly be together, and Ruth is simply in the way.

The first two acts of the film primarily focuses on the love triangle between Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy, but the viewer does catch glimpses of the dystopian world, and the ever-looming donation and Completeness is present. However, it's the third act that really dives into the troublesome rules of this world.

It is an attribute to both the writers and directors of the film (and book that it was based on) and the actors that the viewer so strongly wants these characters to find happiness. The majority of the fourth and final act of the film gives hope to the viewer that at least some of the characters might find happiness, but the poignancy of the film wins over, and by the last scene of the film, the viewer is left with a desire to never let our world get so convoluted as this fictitious world.

The reason the film hit so strongly to this viewer is because while the story is incredibly sad, it is also incredibly unsettling. This idea of our human existence being extended but at the devastating cost of others who are "less human" than us, clones of us, hits hard because of the realization that while we are not sacrificing clones to survive, we do sacrifice others for our existence, whether that be through cheating others to be more comfortable in our lives, looking the other way as others suffer and die, or any of the other ways some thrive at the cost of other's poverty and heartache.

The film ends with this truly poignant line by one of the characters, which is the essence of the entire film: "What I'm not sure about is if our lives [the clones' lives] have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all Complete [die]. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time."

All right, enough sadness.

As shown by the quote above, the film has some incredibly thought-provoking lines and ideas. For example, the idea pictured to the right that art reveals your soul is beautiful.

While at the boarding school, one teacher tells the children, "You have to know who you are, and what you are. It's the only way to lead decent lives."

There are other incredible lines and ideas in the film, but I don't want to give the whole thing away. I just want to give enough to tease you so you'll go enjoy this wonderful film.

Another amazing element to the film is how incredibly-casted the film is, not just with the brilliant Mulligan, Knightley, and Garfield, but with the young children as well. Not only are the children amazing actors, they so resemble the adult actors in both mannerisms and looks is it astounding.

Finally, Rachel Portman truly shines as composer for this film; the music is hauntingly beautiful and perfect throughout the entire film.

Because I need to do my due diligence and write a complete review, I will say that this is not a movie to watch with kids, and you probably want to keep the remote nearby, or perhaps a blindfold, for a scene or two. One scene in particular shows two people engaged in energetic sex (thankfully the scene only lasts about 20 seconds), and another scene shows one character flipping through a pornographic magazine (the character is looking for something and is not looking at the magazine for sexual reasons, so the scene is also brief). In another scene, we hear two characters having sex, but again, this scene is brief.

While I definitely could have done without the sex scenes, the film shines as a masterpiece in all other elements.

Never Let Me Go is a 2010 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's book, with the screenplay written by Alex Garland. The film was directed by Mark Romanek and is rated R for some sexuality and nudity.