NEVER LET GO (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Never Let Go, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 20, 2024

Unsurprisingly, Never Let Go is at its most effective when it's committed to and certain of its story. There's some reason for doubt near the beginning, as we meet a family of three, stuck together in a cabin in the woods in the apparent aftermath of some worldwide devastation. The mother says evil was the cause, and since she and her two sons are the only people left in the world, that evil desperately wants to do them harm—or, more specifically, to make them do harm to each other.

The uncertainty, of course, is that we only know what Momma (Halle Berry) tells her two children Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins). She makes a good argument, since there seems to be no signs of life except for this family, their dog, and the animals they hunt, with recently diminishing returns. When they head out into the forest, they have to keep up their guard, because the Evil, according to the mother, is always nearby, waiting for any one of them to make a mistake.

We're sold on the possibility that Momma is correct, because screenwriters KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby leave that as one potential explanation for what's happening here. Momma is convinced and has complete conviction, and she has taught that to her sons. All of them have to stay connected to the house, which she says was built by her father to ward off the Evil when things in the world started to go wrong, by way of lengths of rope tied to the foundation. If any of them lose the connection to the rope and the Evil touches someone, it will possess that family member and work its malevolent deeds.

All of this is relatively eerie, because director Alexandre Aja treats the premise with sincerity. Early on, the three walk through the woods, searching for food on their own, and strange things occur. Nolan unties his rope to try to reach for a bird egg that has fallen out of the nest, and Samuel stops him. They bicker as brothers do, and then, Nolan is certain he hears Samuel say that their mother loves him more.

If there is an evil at play here, it certainly has an affinity for the mythical and the Biblical, because Momma tells her sons that it wants one of the boys to kill the other and she's convinced that it wants her to eat her own children. There's one other possibility, of course, and it is definitely more frightening than the potential of some supernatural threat in the forest.

The movie is even more convincing when it accepts that far more realistic possibility as, well, the reality of this story. It becomes the tale of a mother, who has convinced herself that everything she has done wrong is to be blamed on some entity that only she can see, and the two children who have spent almost their entire lives in isolation with and within the influence of that parent. Momma's rituals, which seem practical and protective in her perspective, instantly take on a sinister nature.

She locks up her sons in the darkness of the cellar, for example, telling them that they need to purify their souls. If Momma suspects that the Evil might have touched one of her boys, she forces them to recite a sort of incantation with their heads bowed down, while she holds a knife, ready to strike, above them.

This is the story's reality for a long stretch of the movie. The approach allows us to focus on the twisted dynamics of this family and to see it, not as some dark fairy tale about something creepy in the woods, but as an examination of misplaced belief and its effects. Berry plays the role quite persuasively, because her Momma is simply a person who absolutely trusts what's in her mind and genuinely believes she is doing the right thing for her children. This is not some clichéd depiction of insanity or the ravings of some blatantly villainous figure. There's a moment here, after Momma determines a way to provide food for the family for the forthcoming winter, that would seem heartless, but Berry plays it with such vulnerability that it gets at the emotional and psychological conflicted core of the character.

As the sons, Daggs and Jenkins are also very good here, giving natural performances that become the focal point of the movie's final stretch. Nolan starts to piece together that his mother might not be of sound mind, but Samuel either can't or won't even consider that notion. The horrors up until then are in seeing the disparity between Momma's point of view, filled with taunting ghosts or sly demons, and what we, by the way of the children, see. That results in a harrowing scene in which Samuel reveals just how much he wants or has to believe that his mother is right.

Unfortunately, the stuff that is effective here ultimately collapses during the third act, as the filmmakers undermine the psychological nature of this story for something else entirely. It's not as if Never Let Go is technically cheating with its eventual revelations, although the constant and indecisive game-playing comes across that way, but compared to what the movie does until that point, it nonetheless feels like a cheat.

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