Movie review: 'Never Let Me Go' a haunting lesson in impermanence of life, love
“Never Let Me Go” brings together the seemingly incompatible elements of sci-fi horror and the warm visual and emotional colors of bittersweet British romance to create a story of life, love, sacrifice and mortality that haunts long after the end credits roll.
Director Mark Romanek (“One Hour Photo”) and screenwriter Alex Garland (“28 Days Later”) do the expert blending, working from the 2005 novel by Man Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro about a boy and two girls who grow to young adulthood together in a seemingly idyllic English countryside boarding school.
The viewer soon learns all picturesque appearances are deceiving in this alternate world of the 1990s, a decade that has seen the development of a new scientific process that will affect the lives of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) in profoundly harrowing ways.
Hailsham is a very specialized school, devoted to the preparation of children for a special mission that awaits them when they come of age — a duty that is the main reason for their existence.
Meanwhile the close childhood friendship of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth has blossomed into a thorny love triangle by the time they reach majority, and when the terrible truth of their destiny is revealed, the three must confront deep feelings of love and jealousy — and ultimate betrayal — that threaten to tear them apart as they enter the grownup world and begin to make the nightmarish sacrifices that world expects of them.
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