Movie Review: NEVER LET ME GO

Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, is an emotional workout of a movie. As the end credits started to roll, I just wanted to quickly run into another theater showing a comedy. It's not a bad movie. It's actually a very good one. But it's one of the most depressing movies I've seen in a good long time.

It's hard for me to get into the plot without spoiling anything. Let's just say that if The Twilight Zone show was crossed with an independent British film, it would look something like NLMG. Carey Mulligan (An Education), Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), and Keira Knightley (Atonement) star as three friends who meet at a seemingly normal boarding school as young children and grow into the people that life has destined them to be. We don't know much about their families, or the outside world for that matter. All we know is that there are many secrets, and as the movie progresses, we learn said secrets one by one by one.

To say this was a satisfying movie watching experience would be more than fair. To say it was an enjoyable way to spend just under two hours would be lying. Technically this film was made so well, and I can appreciate so much about it. For a movie that seemed to move slowly, I was completely enthralled. If you like movies solely as art, this is the one to put on your must see list. If you like movies as a means of escape and recreation, you might want to skip it. For me, I like both types of films, so I can objectively say this deserves an 7.5 out of 10.

*NEW* (At the end of each film review from now on, I'm going to give my brief summary of how this movie would be for families.)

Family Take: This is not a movie for families. It is rated R, but it's a very mild R. The film gets the R for some graphic images of print pornography. They are all contained in a brief scene, but the camera lingers on the images long enough to warrant the rating. Surprisingly, the person looking at the images is not doing it for sexual stimulation. In addition, there are a couple of sex scenes, but they are done in a way where no nudity is seen on screen. Even without that content factored in, the themes really are for older grades on up. I could see high school classes screening this film for conversations on ethics, but to say more might spoil something.