Director Alexandre Aja’s latest film, Never Let Go, occupies a deliberately liminal space. Its threadbare plot suggests a post-apocalyptic near future, but its central family is stuck in a Gothic past. It stars Halle Berry as the unnamed mother of two boys: Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). Convinced that all human inhabitants of the outside world have “gone evil”, Momma hides her family in a cabin surrounded by woods, only ever leaving to forage for food. On these rare expeditions, Momma and the boys stay tethered by rope to their home. Momma explains that the evil people lurking in the woods seek human prey, but that her family will remain safe as long as they maintain hold of their ropes.

In both narrative and thematic terms, Never Let Go wears shades of folklore but is resolutely a work of American Gothic (even if the director is French and principal photography took place in Vancouver, Canada.) The film’s forest-dwelling monsters might look and act like zombies, looking for prey to transform into kin, but they’re as spectrally obscure as the governess’s visions in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). More than James’ 19th-century novella, though, the film hearkens later literary works: namely, Shirley Jackson’s dark Gothic comedy, The Sundial (1958), and Stephen King’s Gothic Romance, Lisey’s Story (2006).

Like Never Let Go, The Sundial depicts a family sheltering itself against a perceived apocalypse, advancing Shirley Jackson’s career-long project of ambiguating distinctions between madness and the supernatural. In terms of milieu, though, Aja’s film more closely resembles the tragic childhood sections of King’s Lisey’s Story. The flashbacks in King’s novel occur on an isolated farm, where either madness or malicious supernatural forces ravage a man and his two sons. In both King’s novel and Aja’s film, tensions between parents and children escalate into tragic crescendos of violence.

It stands to reason that Aja’s new film intelligently inhabits genre traditions. For over two decades, the director has effectively applied his skills to varying forms of horror — from the intense violence of High Tension (2003) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006) to the dark psychological drama of Horns (2013) and the animal eco-horror of Crawl (2019). With Never Let Go, Aja presents an exploration of belief and delusion that carries an innately contemporary charge. It’s easy to connect the film with current events: consider social media’s proliferation of alternate realities, which include misleading narratives casting the Covid pandemic as a hoax manufactured by shadowy actors for unclear purposes.

Aja’s direction is typically sturdy, if curiously distant — Never Let Go glances at substantive emotional and corporeal horror, but never for long. The film finds some of its most indelible images in the family’s acquisition and preparation of food. As nearby edible resources become depleted, the family resorts to eating bugs and tree bark. To that end, the film is admirably empathetic to the family’s canine companion, whom the mother suggests they slaughter for meat. These scenes open the film to potential ecological readings, depicting the increasingly fraught relationship between the human and more-than-human world. There’s dramatic import to the family’s struggles, thanks to the trifecta of strong lead performances, especially Percy Daggs IV as a child growing increasingly skeptical of his mother’s mental well-being.

Unfortunately, though, Never Let Go collapses in its clumsy and protracted third act, which abandons all compelling abstruseness for dissatisfying over-explanation. Unlike The Sundial and Lisey’s Story, which manage complex allegorical representations of subjective reality, Never Let Go surrenders to thudding literalism. Despite its conceptual and formal strengths, the film fades into a peculiarly slight curiosity — a compelling if misdirected work of contemporary American Gothic.

DIRECTOR: Alexandre Aja;  CAST: Halle Berry, Anthony B. Jenkins, Percy Daggs IV, William Catlett;  DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate;  IN THEATERS: September 20;  RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.

Comments are closed.