Directed by Mark Romanek.Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, Nathalie Richard, Domhnall Gleeson 15A cert, gen release, 103 min
RUTH, TOMMY and Kathy have been best friends throughout their time at Halisham boarding school. Kathy (Carey Mulligan), the most passive among the triumvirate, provides the narration as her loyalties and allegiances shift from a quasi-sapphic crush to full-blown heterosexual love.
Inevitably, Kathy falls for Tommy (Andrew Garfield) just as Ruth (Keira Knightley) gets her talons into him. Has she left things too late? Now that the teens have progressed from their quaint schooling into a comprehensive programme of organ donation, is there enough time left to heal the wounds between them?
Carey Mulligan really needs a quiet word with her agent. We may have delighted in An Education, but there are only so many times one can watch the same lip-trembling, simpering performance before it starts to look like a party piece. Sadly, the thinnest aspect of Mulligan’s thespian prowess forms the rickety spine of this muted, lifeless adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel.
The book may share a plot and dystopian DNA with Michael Bay's The Island(both feature beautiful institutionalised people who discover they exist only to provide organ transplants), but Never Let Me Gois English heritage, not science-fiction.
Even with Mark Romanek’s minimalist direction and a soft rainy palette, it proves trickier to translate than it sounds. The learned helplessness that defines every single character is problematic in a medium where actions speak louder than words. Too often the film engenders the same frustrations as watching a chesty scream queen who never thinks to turn a light on in her attempts to evade a serial murderer.
Pretty, wan, unchanging: the clones are exactly that. They bicker like children but are simply too inert, too enfeebled to amount to a tragedy.
Ishiguro fans will note the delicacy of the author’s strokes in the film’s failings. Kathy’s interior machinations, once vocalised, sound shrill and mean-spirited. Brittle Ruth, who on paper reads like a perfect showcase for Knightley’s enduring regality, loses much of her haughty appeal. Tommy, despite the efforts of Garfield, is as useful as a trampoline at a euthanasia clinic.
Like these unfortunate wretches, Never Let Me Gois a lovely, chilly, vacant, scarcely human thing. TARA BRADY
