Never Let Me Go

Ah, our old film friend, dystopia. Kazuo Ishiguro’s well received novel from 2005, Never Let Me Go, has now been made into a film by Mark Romanek. It follows three children, Ruth (Keira Knightley), Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and their upbringing from boarding school to becoming young adults. They don’t get much further than that though as we are in an alternate universe here where certain children are “bred” so they can donate their organs to severely ill people. I mentioned dystopia at the start, but Romanek’s film doesn’t give any hints visually that we’re in a different time and place than now. England basically just looks like England, albeit a bit greyer (insert gag here). If the idea was to highlight the real horror of the situation in such a low key way, (i.e. the world is just carrying on as normal, but hey, we’ve now got human harvesting) it doesn’t really work. Though I haven’t read the book, it’s been mentioned that the main problem with the film is that it has little emotional impact compared to the source material. It’s obviously highly disturbing if you stop and think about the premise of the film, but the message doesn’t hit home hard enough on screen and what you basically have is a fair chunk of the film being a story of moody teenagers. Romanek himself has said he filmed this as a love story, but when the protagonists are all wetter than a fishes wet bits it’s all a bit dull. In terms of the acting Mulligan is the best, but there’s a sentiment vacuum to the characters and it’s hard to actually care too much about them or their unpleasant fate. The film has fared badly at the box office and there’s been numerous reasons put forward as to why. For me it’s fairly simple. Despite the plot, this is just too slow and staid to peek the average viewer’s interest. Another case of the unfilmable novel?

The OC Film Sting Final Verdict

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that this isn’t a barrel of laughs, but that shouldn’t be a barrier to whether a film is good or not. Unfortunately, the storyline hasn’t translated all that well onto the screen. Rating: 5/10.