Never Let Go (2024) Review

The world has ended, or so says Momma, played by Halle Berry. She lives with her two sons Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and their dog in big wooden house the middle of the woods.

The details of this apocalyptic event are hazy, however Momma repetitively tells her boys that there is an evil out there that can posses you and make you kill your loved ones. This is what had happened to their grandparents and their father and now the trio live in constant fear of the outside world.

The only thing that keeps them safe is the house itself so the only way they can leave is while tied to its foundations on long pieces of rope. If bound to the building they are safe but should that rope break or they stray beyond it, who know what terrible things will happen. That’s why they must ‘never let go’.

But as time passes, supplies run out and starvation sets in Nolan starts to question his mothers superstitions and rituals and the validity of the vicious shape shifting spectre that only she can see living in the forest. When a horrible life or death decision pushes the trio over the edge the family is thrown into chaos and the truth about the world around them is finally revealed.

Or is it? And here lies the main problem with Never Let Go, a film that seems more concerned with fucking with its audience to prove how smart it is than actually telling a satisfying story or giving its audience solid scares.

Penned by writing duo KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby and directed by High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes and Crawl’s Alexandre Aja the movie follows a familiar pattern that has been seemingly spawned from the success of A Quiet Place.

This niche and grim genre of films are all set after an unexpected apocalypse featuring a small family who must follow a set of strange rules in order to survive. Not the most engaging at the best of times films like Bird Box for all its depressing drama at least offer moments of chilling horror prompted by the unknown terror lurking just out of view.

Thrusting us in without any explanation, Never Let Go attempts to do the same, making us fear for the family however the only shocks come from the sound system of the cinema being turned up to 11. And Berry’s over-cooked performance quickly makes the audience question her sanity, making the first half of the movie simply play out like child abuse.

The concept of a parent concocting a world of lies for the greater good of protecting a child, another niche genre all of its own, can be the set up to a great story and movies as diverse as Freaks, which shares a lot of similarities with Never Let Go, and the heart wrenching holocaust drama Life Is Beautiful have used this hook with huge success.

Again, Never Let Go does not follow this path either, frustratingly setting up rules and ideas and then abandoning them when it is convent. And what quickly comes out is that the film wants you to keep questioning everything and this is something that in my opinion never works

When I saw The Sixth Sense I was blown away by its ending (although it was spoiled for me 5 minutes before I left the house to go to the cinema, true story) but unfortunately as soon as M. Night Shyamalan’s name became synonymous with twists I just spent the entirety of Unbreakable, Signs, The Village and the god awful Lady in the Water guessing what the twist would be and it never made them more enjoyable.

Movies should absorb you and transport you, they should take you to other worlds and let you live other people’s lives. Any film where you spend the whole run time analysing each scene and every line to see if it proves that yes there is a supernatural apocalypse or no Hallie Berry is a just a nutter torturing her own kids prevents any real engagement from its audience especially when it is deliberately trying to trick you all the time.

Classics like A Clockwork Orange, Oldboy and Psycho toy with the audience manipulating your relationship with the main protagonists, taking you on a roller coaster ride where you are never ready for the next loop. Never Let Go is more akin to a dumb infuriating child asking you to find its hidden toy. And then after 1 hour of searching telling you it never hid the toy in the first place.

Are there any positives? Well the two boys Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV do a fine job with what little they have and I wish them all the best for their future careers. Aside from that, no.

Avoiding several far more interesting paths played out in several far more interesting and far more frightening films, Never Let Go has nothing to say yet manages to say nothing in the most annoying way possible. Its entire function seems to be to smugly wag a finger in its audience’s face and bemoan their ignorance at not working out what was really going on all along, even though it never actually gets round to explaining itself properly, probably because if it did it would make even less sense.

Don’t waste your time on this film. Let it go and go watch something else instead.

Movie Rating:

Never Let Go trailer