'Never Let Go' is a Vicious, Southern Gothic Fairytale Exploring the Dangers of Holding on Too Tight [Review]

​Letting go is hard. Letting go of family is even harder. The binding of blood has a way of keeping us tied down to old traditions, to parents who say they have our best interest at heart yet leave us questioning if that’s true. Of course, this isn’t every family. But for many of us, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our relatives, can be a rope that binds us to a responsibility we never asked for. Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Crawl) brings his vicious style of filmmaking to this concept in Never Let Go, a southern gothic fairytale with teeth that bites into the terror of a crumbling household where escape seems impossible. Though the stagnant script leaves much to be desired, engaging performances, particularly from the young stars, suck us into a fantastical world ripe with tension.
 
Halle Berry makes a welcome return to horror after years away as a mother who lives in an isolated swamp with her sons, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). The boys have never left their home, because they cannot. According to mom, an evil that only she can see lurks outside their door, able to possess them with a single touch. All that protects them is the magical wood of their house, and lengths of rope that they must tie to themselves whenever venturing outdoors. As a harsh winter season sets in and the family finds themselves starving, Nolan questions the validity of his mother and the so-called evil, setting off a chain of events that threatens to destroy them all.
 
I’m not going to bore you with the details, but my relationship with my family is…strained, to say the least. If you’ve ever felt the same, prepare for Never Let Go to prick at some sensitive nerves. Through a complex performance from Halle Berry, we meet a mother we aren’t sure we can trust. She claims an evil only she can see has destroyed everyone, leaving herself and her children as the last people on Earth. She tells her boys that they must wear a rope connected to the house when outdoors so that the evil cannot touch them, a metaphorical anchor representative of the overprotective parent who fears the outside world. And they must say a prayer over the sacred wood of their home whenever mother worries they have come into contact with the evil, knife held to the back of their heads just in case. The family’s isolation has left them bone-thin and haggard, forced to sustain themselves on bugs, squirrels, whatever they can find. Within minutes, KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby’s script begins ratcheting up the tension, filling the viewer with unease as we bear witness to what is so obviously an abusive household, lurking evil or not.

Akin to a classic Grimm’s fairytale, Aja instills his vicious sensibilities into this dark fairytale that isn’t afraid to get mean. At first, Never Let Go glows with a rich, southern gothic vibe, planting the characters in a lush setting that feels at once magical and dangerous. Yet that eerie beauty quickly begins to fade as Nolan and his mother clash, Samuel stuck in the middle. Starvation forces the family to eat all sorts of queasy meals. Increasing tension results in shocking domestic violence. Frightening visages of evil, often appearing as snake-tongued people, haunt the property just past the front porch. Loosely inspired by “Hansel and Gretel”, it’s the children’s own home that they can’t escape this time, trapped in a brutal existence reflective of how overprotectiveness is an abuse in and of itself. All throughout, Aja sprinkles this sinister bedtime story with his trademark nastiness, causing a worm of unease to wriggle in your stomach. Most effective in the scare department though is a slithering sound design that hisses like it’s right behind your ear, bleeding an unsettling atmosphere that’ll raise a few hairs.
 
Where Never Let Go struggles to get free is a constrained script that follows the “less is more” path to its own detriment. I tend to agree with that approach, but in the case of Aja’s latest, it leaves the film feeling like we’re only given the snakeskin and not the snake itself. In an effort to have us questioning what’s real and what isn’t, lore is minimal and the plot bare bones. One too many rules for the evil come off as inconsistent or contrived, slowing momentum and forcing us to grasp at scraps of concepts. The good news? The performances are engaging enough to carry the viewer through the murky swamp of a plot. We expect Berry to be great—and she is—but it’s young Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV who are exceptional in their roles. Their terror. Their anger. Their fleeting moments of joy. The actors handle it all with ease and add a legitimacy to the fear that comes with growing up under an unstable parent. My fairytale wish is that we see much more of them in the future.  
 
Visually rich and steeped in grim fairytale vibes, Never Let Go has just enough going for it to keep you roped in, even when the convoluted narrative trips over itself. Aja’s fierce sensibilities blend well with this southern gothic take on a cruel bedtime story, lifted by performances that swallow you whole. Sure, it’s missing a few scales, but in a way, the film feels like a strong counter to those parents we currently see banning books and demanding their kids be sheltered from anything they don’t approve of. Letting go is hard. But holding on too tight is when the real damage occurs.

Never Let Go slithers into theaters September 20th from Lionsgate. 

By Matt Konopka