London Film Festival 2010: Never Let Me Go

The 54th BFI London Film festival got off to a flying start with the UK premiere of Never Let Me Go, which offered the perfect red-carpet trifecta of Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and soon-to-be-Spiderman Andrew Garfield. Directed by Mark Romanek (interviewed in some depth at the Empire website by Nev Pierce here), written by Alex Garland and based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, it promised to be a modern masterpiece. Right? Sadly, it wasn't for me. There's something about quality-lit-goes-sci-fi that doesn't really work for me, and parts of this deadly earnest production reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale, Volker Schlondorff's stuffy 1990 adaptation of Margaret Atwood's dystopian-future novel (the major difference being that this is set in a dystopian recent past). It's a shame, because what the film does, it does very well, and it's so borderline uncommercial that I feel bad putting the boot in. Which I'm kind of about to do.

*Massive spoilers for the next two paragraphs*

It's impossible to discuss what's right and wrong about this film without addressing the plot, which, like Panic Room is pretty obvious from the get-go and is the elephant in the room for the first 30 minutes. It's hinted at in the trailer, the film's been described as Grange Hill meets Logan's Run (it's actually more like Malory Towers), and there's been a fucking book of it on the shelves since 2005. But if you don't know, the premise is that a bunch of lonely boarding-school friends begin to realise that they are not like other children: they are clones who are being raised purely as organ donors. Once they reach adulthood, they will begin the donation process, and after three or four surgeries they will “complete”, ie, die.

OK, I thought, this is quite an impressive premise: where's it going? Not having read the book, which I think uses first-person narrative, I was prepared to follow it, and the first half of the movie was interesting, with well-cast newcomers (including rising star Ella Purnell as the young Keira) playing the three protagonists as they settle into the love triangle that will dominate their lives. After 40 minutes or so, having learned their fate, they turn into their more Bafta-friendly older selves, and this is where the film really starts losing momentum. First, they leave school and move to a farm. Then ten years pass. But, like Inception, there is no concept of an outside world or a wider context. Fair enough, you might say, since the story is being narrated to us by Kathy H (Mulligan), so we see things as she sees them. But this isn't a book, and when the action strays into the 'real' world, a lot of soon-to-be-unanswered questions are raised. Like, what kind of society tolerates this? And my biggest bugbear: how come this dumb – sorry naïve – lot only think about the important issues in their lives according to the dramatic needs of a 105-minute feature film?

*End of spoilers*

Plot aside, I thought the performances were decent, although Garfield was by far the weakest of the three, and if RP accents grate on you, then this is the aposhalypse. I came away from it nonplussed, especially when the simple message appears to be “Life's too short”, which is pretty much what the US audience said when it was released there last month.