Halle Berry can be effective in scary thrillers, but we need her to start out with at least a modicum of composure. The first sensation in Never Let Go – of Berry having already lost the plot – leaves her performance backed up against a wall, fraught and dishevelled, with no room to breathe.
To be fair, the audience’s grip on that plot isn’t great, either, and this is very much the fault of the screenwriting. Berry’s character, named simply “Momma”, is hiding out in a woodland shack with her two young boys, Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (poor Anthony B Jenkins, fresh off The Deliverance and saddled with yet more domestic abuse).
Leery of the wider world, this trio must forage in the wild for food, but according to Momma, a nameless evil – well, she calls it “The Evil” – is coming to get them, unless they remain tethered at all times to the house by lengths of rope. Sometimes, we see what Momma sees – a slavering, pasty crone (Kathryn Kirkpatrick) clambering in their direction with a forked tongue – and sometimes what the boys see, which is nothing of the sort.
It doesn’t take long for the viewer, and at least one of the lads, to wonder if we’re dealing with overprotective lunacy, in the great tradition of horror hysteria dating back to The Turn of the Screw. Jamesian this is not, sadly. As helmed with empty flash by genre specialist Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Mirrors, Crawl), the film doesn’t go in for slippery ambiguity so much as a bald choice of two realities, along with a lot of half-digested Biblical allegory: it’s more like Darren Aronofsky’s mother! crossed with the complete works of M. Night Shyamalan.
There’s a snake in this garden, and while Hansel and Gretel get mentioned, the story eventually switches tack to Cain and Abel, just like mother! did. Aronofsky’s film had chutzpah, momentum, surging waves of ideas, and exceptional craft. This is a dingy mess. The Evil only takes the form of white people – is this the point? No one brings it up. The film teeters on a precipice where blind faith is either salvation or nightmare – the one core idea that’s potentially intriguing.