Director – Alexandre Aja, Screenplay – K.C. Coughlin & Ryan Grassby, Producers – Alexandre Aja, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine & Shawn Levy, Photography – Maxime Alexandre, Music – Rob, Visual Effects – Mac Guff VFX (Supervisors – Thierry Onillon & Jean-Luc Perrin) & Tempest FX (Supervisor – Marc Steinberg), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Benjamin, Prosthetics & Creature Design Morot FX Studios (Supervisor – Adrien Morot), Production Design – Jeremy Stanbridge. Production Company – 21 Laps Entertainment/Halleholly Productions.
Cast
Halle Berry (Momma), Percy Daggs IV (Nolan), Anthony B. Jenkins (Samuel), Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Grandma), Matthew Kevin Anderson (Hiker), Cadence Compton (Hiker’s Daughter), Will Catlett (Poppa)
Plot
A mother lives at a cabin in the woods with her two sons Nolan and Samuel. The mother gives strident warnings about The Evil that lurks outside. The only safe way to venture away from the safety of the cabin is with ropes around their waist that bind them to the house. She warns how The Evil creates illusions to trick them and how they must never leave the safety of the ropes. However, they now face dwindling supplies and imminent starvation. Nolan does the unthinkable and starts to question whether The Evil actually exists and if they could not just walk out to safety.
French director Alexandre Aja is a name that has consistently worked in genre material. He first gained notice with his second film, the gore-drenched High Tension (2003). Aja was brought to the US for the remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and has remained there ever since with the likes of Mirrors (2008), the remake of Piranha (2010), Horns (2013), the non-genre thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016), the killer alligator film Crawl (2019) and the SF film Oxygen (2021). Aja has also produced/written P2 (2007), the remake of Maniac (2012), The Pyramid (2014) and produced The Other Side of the Door (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017) and Night of the Hunted (2023). Never Let Go comes from Halle Berry’s production company Halleholly Productions and is a co-production with Shawn Levy, director of Real Steel (2011) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).
As it opens, Never Let Go creates a fascinatingly weird world where Halle Berry and sons live in fear of The Evil that lurks around the cabin. Their only safety in venturing forth in search of supplies is to tie ropes around their waists that link them back to the cabin. Whenever they experience a particularly gruelling time outside, the boys are placed in a hollow beneath a trapdoor in the floor and left in the dark until they can connect with the spirit of the house again.
There is a great dramatic scene not far in where Anthony B. Jenkins unties his rope in the woods only to fall and twist his ankle. Halle Berry comes running, tying her rope around both sons and herself and huddling together while behind the zombie of an old woman lurks. Aja’s camera keeps cutting between the slavering zombie behind Halle’s shoulder and back to medium and wide angle to show there is nothing there.
Mother Halle Berry (c) and sons Anthony B. Jenkins (l) and Percy Daggs IV (r) with ropes tying them to the safety of their cabin
Between Halle Berry’s harsh, urgent warnings about the dangers to be found outside, Never Let Go creates a compulsive, fascinating atmosphere. At the same time, we are unsure exactly what is going on. Or even for that matter when things are taking place – there is the suggestion at one point that this is some type of Post-Apocalyptic work and that life in the cities has collapsed. There is something similar to the recent tv series From (2022- ) with its group of people trapped in a small town in some kind of pocket universe as mysterious things gather nightly to attack any of them trapped outside and where the world they are in operates according to a strange and inexplicable series of rules.
The film continues to put the screws on the audience. We go through the family’s starvation and being reduced to eating tree bark. Halle Berry’s proposed solution to their starvation is a gruelling scene that is not recommended for pet lovers. And then there is the jolt appearance two-thirds of the way through of Matthew Kevin Anderson, which immediately spins everything we think is happening on its head and plays out with a tension between the boys that is gripping and comes to a brutal end.
Eventually, Never Let Go transpires as a work of The Ambiguously Fantastic. [PLOT SPOILERS]. In the latter half, the film is leaning in the direction that everything that might be happening is a Mad Person’s Delusion. The film starts to undergo the Conceptual Breakthrough not unlike the one in Frailty (2001). But right up until the very end, Alexandre Aja also keeps suggesting that there still might be something real to what Halle Berry has been saying.
