Film review: Never Let Me Go (Director: Mark Romanek)

Something is different. It may look and feel like the world we know, but it isn't. Or rather, it is but not quite. A medical breakthrough occurred in 1952, we read on the opening screen, leading to a cure of most serious diseases. Waht it was we do not learn. Rather we are soon plunged into an English boarding school, or maybe an orphanage. Everything is normal, the children happy, the teachers kind.

And yet, again there is feeling that something is not quite right. It's subtle hints mostly, easy to miss, hardly noticeable and yet, because of this subtlety, particularly powerful: the daily routines like the jug of milk for every child accompanied by what looks like a pill box, the scanner they must activated when they leave the building, they have first names but only initials or surnames, the teachers are called guardians, the cryptic hints that they are special. These children, we soon gather, ar not "normal", they are here for a reason, a special purpose.

When the secret is revealed, it happens so matter-of-factly, so devoid of sentimentality that the viewer has no way of escaping. Director Mark Romanek succeeds to translate this earthshattering moment in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel into such a dry, stark, totally unsensational scene that manages in its pointedly unremarkable nature to anchor the film. After this everything is different, especially because nothing changes.

For this is the most disturbing aspect of both book and film: When the children learn what their sole purpose in life is, that they have been created as nothing more than human material to help others, they continue like before. Their conditioning has been effective: Never is there even a hint that breaking out, rebelling against their fate is even conceivable. Not for the children, not for the guardians. Horror stories about what happens when you climb the fence are accepted without questioning. Even later, when they try to change the life for which they were created they do so within the system. To fight is never enters anybody's mind.

Romanek, along with Ishiguro, poses questions which touch the very essens of what it means to be human: How far are we  willing to go for progress? What are we ready to sacrifice to help others? Surely, this goes way too far, but where is the limit? The film asks the questions, we must find the answers. But he also does something else: He shows, ever so subtly, how power mechanisms work, how societies function how people can be conditioned to willingly, even proudly, assist in their own destruction. And Romanek does this with the slightest of brushes, again, one must be careful not to miss the subtle hints.

In the middle of all of this, Romanek unfolds a growing-up story, a complicated love tale, so narmal, its stark contrast to the larger issues discussed is shockingly moving. He has assempled a fantastic cast: Carey Mulligan as the kind, rational, patient Cathy, Keira Knightly as the manipulative, dominating yet ultimately help- and clueless Ruth and particularly Andrew Garfield, whose Tommy, always a little lost, naive but hopeful, mirrors the audience's response most closely.

All of thois takes place in a pleasant enough world which however is strangely fogged. When the sun shines, it lacks brilliance and warmth, there is always a veil over the mages, infusing the scene with a sense of melancholy and a feeling that this is a shadow world, not even existing to the "normal people" out there. Yet there is color, there is life, against the odds. Each sequence of scenes is introduced with a different color, pale but vibrant. it is one of those many subtle, unassuming signals in this remarkable, humane as well as unforgiving film.