After playing around with genre in a more confined sandbox with Crawl and Oxygen, Never Let Go finds Alexandre Aja venturing back to terrain similar to that of 2003’s High Tension. As in that home invasion thriller, the remote setting in Never Let Go generates an oddly claustrophobic tension all its own, only here the home is a reliable place of safety. It’s a bastion in the woods that protects fraternal twins Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) from “the Evil” that lies outside their doorstep, and which could destroy them with a single touch. Or so their Momma (Halle Berry) tells them on a daily basis.
Momma demands that whenever her boys go outside, they tie a rope that’s connected to the home around their waists, allowing them to wander only so far into the surrounding woods. This symbolic umbilical cord imagery spells out just how overprotective she is toward her children, whose entire perception of the world has been shaped by everything she’s told them since birth.
When the twins’ ropes come undone during a brief scuffle and nothing bad happens to them, Sam begins to suspect that the world might just not be the horrific place that he’s been led to believe that it is. The filmmakers are careful to show that the physical incarnations of “the Evil”—which primarily takes the form of gruesome versions of members of Momma’s family—can only be seen by Momma, further blurring the line between what may be real or imagined.
While this setup is particularly ripe for exploring the nature of motherhood and the complexity of interrelationships within the family unit, Never Let Go barely digs beneath the surface of these themes. There’s an intensifying conflict between Nolan and Sam once the latter rebels against his mother and the former remains blindly loyal to her despite mounting evidence that she may be misleading them, purposely or not. The film remains frustratedly and stubbornly preoccupied with whether Momma is delusional or not for a majority of its runtime.
The film’s fixation on the woman’s psychological state is more than a little exploitative, in no small part because this aspect of the plot leans heavily on misdirects to keep us from figuring out if “the Evil” is real or not. And as the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
As the film’s focus lies more on the children’s shifting relationship with Momma, we’re privy to little of what’s actually out in the wilderness. Thus, the only frightening moments that Never Let Go delivers come from a handful of cheap jump scares when Momma is out there looking for food. This would be fine were the film trading chills for genuinely compelling character building. But even the latter is sacrificed in a plodding game of is-she-or-isn’t-she that grows tiresome and enervating as the film increasingly refuses to even play by its own rules.
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