Never Let Me Go 2010

Review by Tim Robey

Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, which opened the London Film Festival last night, is much more upfront about its subject than the well-received Kazuo Ishiguro novel it’s based on. That subject being the state-sanctioned rearing of organ donors, you’ve got to wonder how cheery the after-party was. Devilled kidneys, anyone?

Fashioning the book’s secrets into thriller-ish twists would have been the absolute worst decision Alex Garland’s screenplay might have made, and it’s much too smart and controlled for that. Still, it’s possible to wish it were a little more radical. Everything seems designed to reassure the book’s fans with a vague sense of reverence, while surreptitiously (and sensibly) pruning off its more self-conscious literary effects. Overcautious though the filmmaking tends to be, there’s a tactile emotional charge here which does cumulatively resonate.

Carey Mulligan narrates as Kathy H, one corner of a tragic love triangle formed at Hailsham, the school where most of Ishiguro’s book is set. Unlike him, Garland and Romanek pinpoint a period for us – it kicks off in 1978 – and all but fast-forward through the adolescent trials of Kathy, her haughty friend Ruth, later played by Keira Knightley, and the volatile Tommy (Andrew Garfield), whom both women ultimately vie to be with.

Romanek, a noted music-video whizz whose second feature this is, does an important job laying the story’s emotional foundations with his younger actors, and the cinematography by Adam Kimmel (Capote) has a chilly elegance. Just as in the book, though – which I thought highly overrated – the plotting gets repetitive, and the hingeing of the characters’ hopes on the possibility of a temporary reprieve feels flatly mechanical.

Why don’t they put up more of a fight? The filmmakers might have tried challenging Ishiguro’s sillier notions: that only art can prove the existence of a soul, and only the gifted can fall deeply in love.

Through it all, Rachel Portman’s tinkling score insists away on Tremulous Sensitivity, something the lead trio of actors are handling well enough by themselves. Mulligan and Garfield work towards the hardest thing doomed lovers can achieve in genuinely seeming meant to be together, and have heartbreaking moments of hope and tenderness.

Knightley, in the smaller role of Ruth, pulls off her complicated hospital scenes with more persuasive technique than she may have ever displayed, even overcoming the central implausibility of casting Keira Knightley as a donor of organs: where does she keep them?

Dir: Mark Romanek; starring: Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan, Andrea Riseborough.