Never Let Me Go, review

Never Let Me Go, review

One of this year's prestige-picture casualties, Never Let Me Go holds back from its full potential. Rating: * * *

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By Tim Robey 6:04PM GMT 10 Feb 2011

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12A cert, 104 min

Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go feels like one of this year’s prestige-picture casualties, a coolly sensitive literary offering which has been barged aside, a little unjustly, by more ingratiating attractions.

Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-shortlisted novel about the residents of a, shall we say, unusual boarding school, Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland manage to avoid sticky overstatement — something Ishiguro doesn’t always do — and the ways they fast-forward to the emotional nub of the story are smart.

But the film holds back from its full potential, faintly apologetic with what it’s pruning, and too conscious of itself (perhaps with half an eye on Joe Wright’s Atonement) as a tastefully middlebrow package.

Ishiguro’s central love triangle is animated vitally enough by the lead performances, which are much better than some conspicuously dodgy wigs might lead you to expect. Carey Mulligan narrates as Kathy H, a diligent and demure student at Hailsham, the school whose pupils realise they’re something special. The script isn’t coy about this — they’re clones, being reared for their organs. Trying to keep this from us as some kind of twist would have been a disaster, since the dramatic core is entirely about what they’re able to do with the time they have left. The trouble is, though Kathy loves Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and he loves her back, her friend Ruth (Keira Knightley) is a faster mover and snaps him up.

It remains unlikely that Knightley’s fearfully thin frame would be many people’s first choice of organ-incubation unit, but she impresses with some bleak hospital scenes, and the Mulligan-Garfield relationship is tender, upsetting and delicately played. The plot suffers, as it did on the page, from how accepting these lambs are of their impending slaughter. A bit more attitude, some suggestion of rebelling against their lot, might have made its tragic inevitability all the sadder.

kazuo ishiguro, incubation unit, carey mulligan, keira knightley, demure student, alex garland, rsquo, love triangle, friend ruth, joe wright, thin frame, romanek, robey, overstatement, s central, nub, shortlisted, boarding school, atonement, wigs

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