Never Let Go is Alexandra Aja’s latest, but a decided step down from the director of 2019’s solid creature feature Crawl, sticking to a formula of a post apocalyptic landscape where two brothers and their mother survive in the house in the middle of the woods tied by rope to the basement. Should they leave the rope, the evil will get them. Only their mother can see this evil but it is tempting at every turn – leaving treats, important items such as food – just outside the reach of the rope, daring the young boys to remove it. Daring them to fall victim.
The film positions itself as a tense, hyper focused thriller with the family as a core bond; Anthony B Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV’s Nolan and Samuel are brothers with their own approaches, thinly drawn characters whose main purpose is to either agree or disagree with their mother. Samuel pushes back against Nolan’s devotion to his mother, questioning the evil that can only be seen by her – but is it all part of the evil’s plan? Never Let Go doesn’t quite have the same constantly guessing factor as Speak No Evil, but initially, it does enough to guess you. The more the layers are peeled back behind Halle Berry’s Momma, the more her past is revealed, the more you, the audience, begin to doubt her too.
The film tries to both at once have things both ways – make you believe in the evil while keeping you in doubt. Its final act kind of lost me completely as it never really convinced me, taking the dynamics of family and upending it with the addition of an evil that takes the form of something that only the mother can see. You’re constantly left guessing and the film doubles back on itself for every one act that it upends it – but the world it creates and the threadbare mythmaking is enough to have me eager; jumping at the seams to know more about where Never Let Go is headed – ultimately to its disappointing conclusion that never fully commits early on.
The technical level builds the suspense and the creepiness factor is there; you’re left with a skin-crawling sense of unease that Aja is good at. But that said; the film never truly manages to match the heights of the close-knit quarters of Crawl and the creepy moments kind of fall away once the cat is out of the bag. There’s Shyamalan-esque themes of family running through the core plotline of this movie but it never truly does it justice the same way Shyamalan could; and has – this year alone with Trap, but one thing the film is making it so good at building in its world is the house at the heart of its epicentre. It feels real; its emotional beats are the movie’s biggest strengths, as flawed as they are, and you buy Momma and her sons competing for her love, manipulated into doing so by the evil. It questions how long one can keep fighting for – how long one can keep living for – and it does so with mixed success; never thrilling enough to be outwardly engaging.
