★★★★
I enjoyed this movie. The best thing about the film is the idea at its base: take an element of the human condition and highlight it by using a setting that you’d have to call sci-fi. This isn’t sci-fi that speculates about the future, either future technology or the future society. The aim in Never Let Me Go is to use a single sci-fi element to highlight something about our present life and examine it. This one element aside, the world of Never let Me Go is ours.
The film is both poignant and incisive, along the lines of Solaris, Gattaca or Moon, addressing the subjects of death and love. I’m sure the source material, a story by Kazuo Ishifuro, contributed to this theme, but Mark Romanek did a nice job with the setting and pacing of the film to bring the viewer into the drama before us. I like how Romanek’s conception of the film uses the sci-fi element only to create the conditions that let him sharpen the terms of the film; the sci-fi element highlights the life-and-death issue, and everything else here is so quotidian that I hardly noticed the sci-fi element. What’s more, I was struck even more strongly by the terms of the film because of the normality of the setting. And it isn’t just Romanek’s direction that makes the film work: The three main actors do a good job, too. I liked this film a lot and found it very worth my time as a meditation on love and death.
