NEVER LET GO MOVIE REVIEW

		Review by E.C.McMullen Jr.
NEVER LET GO - 2024 USA Release: Sep. 20, 2024 Media Capital Technologies, 21 Laps Entertainment, HalleHolly, Lionsgate Films Rated: USA: R

NEVER LET GO starts with the movie lingering through a forest. This is an old place, nothing kept trim, nothing cultivated. The wild lives and dies here.

There is death, the rotting corpse, nearly skeleton, of a small child.

From here we enter the lives of Momma (Halle Berry: THE RICH MAN'S WIFE, THE X-MEN, X-MEN UNITED, GOTHIKA, PERFECT STRANGER, X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, THE CALL) and her two children, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins: ROSWELL [TV], FLORIDA MAN [TV], THE DELIVERANCE) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV: UNDONE [TV], THE LAST DAYS OF PTOLEMY GRAY [TV]), and their guardian watchdog, Koda.

Through voice-over narration - too much of it - we learn that the world died as it was taken over by The Evil (Stephanie Lavigne: DISQUIET, HERETIC). This Evil can look like a monster or a regular person. It may look like a child, crying for help, dying in the forest.

"This is what it does to trick you," says Momma. "All it has to do is touch you and the Evil is inside you."

The only protection is the house. The "Blessed House of Ancient Wood, Protector of the Pure and Good," is Heaven and in essence, their God. When they have to go outside to tend their vegetables or hunt (anything including frogs eaten alive), they stay tethered to the house and each other by a long rope. The power of the house protects you so long as you are held by the rope which is held by the house.

Never go beyond the rope.

There's no rope on Koda because The Evil only wants humans.

Before the first act is over, within the first five minutes or so, its clear that The Evil is all in Momma's head. She is the only one who sees it, who can ever see or hear it. The movie makes it clear because not even Koda can respond to the hallucinations created in Momma's head.

We get flashes of what Momma did in the past. Momma's been a paranoid schizophrenic for a very long time. For her children, born and raised into this endless, fixating insanity, Momma's faith and ironclad rules of staying alive is all they've ever known. They have the unquestioning faith of children, but like all children, they are growing. With growth comes experience. For the two brothers, as young as they are, the time is coming to put away childish things, but not all adults do.

Both boys are utterly convinced that if Momma suspected either of being touched by The Evil, she would kill them rather than let the Evil damn their souls.

They are just as convinced that death by Momma's hands would be done out of love. Momma's love is fierce, strong, and protective, and they love her just as much.

What the children don't know is that, despite her powerful faith, Momma can't escape her memories. She knows what she has done to defend her madness. Sometimes she sees the dead body of her own Mother, Father, Husband, reminding her of what she did.

The insect hordes of Momma's many guilts crawl and beetle about in her mind, remembering what she's done and how she has to fight ever harder with herself, self-hypnotising a fantasy to blanket the reality she's all too aware of, to tell herself she's right.

It's exhausting to hold such a fractured mindset together, which leads Momma to wonder that, if she has this much trouble convincing herself, what are her little boys thinking?

The writing team of K.C. Coughlin and Ryan Grassby (MEAN DREAMS, THE KING TIDE) are still exploring the same themes they've done in their other critically acclaimed indie movies. Themes explored and shared by other modern writer directors like Robert Eggers (THE WITCH, THE LIGHTHOUSE, THE NORTHMAN).

Alexandre Aja directs only Horror movies, but spent most of his career directing remakes (THE HILLS HAVE EYES [2006], MIRRORS, PIRANHA 3D) or blatant rip offs of other people's work that he gave himself credit for (HAUTE TENSION - taken from the Dean R. Koontz novel, INTENSITY). As a director Aja is great, may be one of the best alive, but it appears that, after ten years (2003 - 2013), he realized that being the Regent of Remakes was a dead-end career path that garnered little respect, no matter how much money you made the studios.

Since 2013's low budget HORNS, based on the best selling novel by Joe Hill, and this time actually credited to the author, Alexandre worked to reset his career on a better path and, staying on this track throughout the second decade of his career, the results (CRAWL) are starting to pay off.

Who doesn't love a Comeback story?

Whatta you mean, you don't? What's wrong with you?

This is not some back-handed compliment or damnation via faint praise. Alexandre has taken ten long years to leave his mistakes of the past and create a better legacy for himself. You can never fix the mistakes you've made, you can only stop repeating them.

I respect the integrity of such an effort. Aja's taking on low budget, low paying projects, leaving the proferred big studio remake money on the table.

He's sticking with honing his craft in telling scary stories and its paying off.

I mentioned Robert Eggers THE WITCH earlier and its parallel to NEVER LET GO, but that's not copying. There are thousands of ghost novels and movies. Thousands of vampire, werewolf, and zombie novels and movies and many take a fresh and compelling way of telling the story, through strong characters. That said, while I found nothing scary in Eggers THE WITCH, Alexandre knows exactly where the Scary is in NEVER LET GO and he knows how to show it.

Halle Berry smashes this role as you should expect of an Oscar winning actor and the weight of this movie lives or dies by her performance. Child actors Jenkins and Dagg were fully convincing as her frightened but loving children.

Many movies like this fall apart by an epic, disastrous scale when, in the last few minutes of the movie (or pages of the novel), with an awkward twist they betray everything in the whole story, as well as the audience, by showing the Monster / Evil was real the whole time, exonerating the most murderously insane character in the tale.

Fear not. The Writers and Director didn't betray their audience.

NEVER LET GO is a winner worth watching.

4 Shriek Girls

This review copyright 2006 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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