Alexandre Aja’s reputation has changed in the years since his controversial 2004 film High Tension: Many fans of the genre now recognize his undeniable skill at working sets and tight locations. If you don’t like Crawl, I don’t know what to tell you. He returns this week with another single-set piece. This one, however, has a very different tone, unfolding as a parable (or several) about how far a mother will go to protect her children. Maybe. Well, that and a few other things. Aja’s directing skills are still top-notch, and he works with a top technical team to take what is this time a rather convoluted script to new levels. Just as you’re grasping what Never Let Go is saying or symbolizing thematically, it slips through your fingers. A hodgepodge of mental illness, trauma, overprotectiveness, the existence of evil, and what feels like COVID allegories, Never Let Go fails because of its conflicting ideas. There’s too little left to hold onto.
Never Let Go takes place almost entirely in a remote house inhabited by only three people: an unnamed mother (Halle Berry) and her two sons, Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins). They have a set of rules that make the first act of Never Let Go seem like a variation on A Quiet Place, another story of a family battling the evil that surrounds their sanctuary. The most important is that they must remain tied to a rope connected to their cabin when they go foraging or just experiencing nature. The mother tells the boys about an evil that will infect them if they leave the rope behind—whether the rope can be understood as masks/vaccines for a family in lockdown during a pandemic is up to you—but only she can see that evil, which takes the form of dead loved ones like their abusive mother and her terrible husband. If given the chance, the “evil” will infect her or the boys, trapping the trio in a house with dwindling supplies.
Since only Mama can see the gruesome creations – and kudos to the makeup team – Nolan begins to question whether they are real. And by the film’s climax, so do we. What if Mama’s visions are just hallucinations brought on by years of trauma? Is this all another horror allegory for mental illness? As the trio starves, distrust grows between the boys. Nolan begins to doubt and Samuel stands by Mama. There is a showdown over what is really in the forest and whether Nolan and Samuel should be more afraid of it or their Mama.
All We Had to Give contains many ideas, but too many of them are left unexplored. Berry said at the film’s premiere at Fantastic Fest that she hoped it was a film that people would think about for days afterward. Still, that’s probably a mistake, because too much thinking about this film’s themes leads to confusion.
The biggest problem is the missed opportunity to delve into the thread of KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby’s script that has the most potential: the possibility that Mom went mad years ago. Berry doesn’t use that idea nearly enough, remaining too one-note as the protective matriarch, though there is a version of the film where her character can be genuinely disturbing. She speaks of an evil that took hold of her years ago in the real world, a world she says is now gone, but we have as much reason to believe that as the boys do. This character should carry trauma and potential madness in her every line and every bone, but Berry makes too many easy choices for such a complex role.
The best parts of All We Had to Give are thanks to Aja’s direction and his dedicated team. He makes wonderful use of movement in the background, drawing our attention to something threatening in the forest or through a window before our protagonists see it. He developed a visual language with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre on films like Crawl and Oxygen, and it works again here. It’s a visually impressive film with a sound that’s enhanced by an effective score by Robin Coudert.
While these elements are commendable, they can’t make up for where this film misses its mark. Or, I should say, many marks. Aja’s best films have momentum, pushing us in one direction on an ever-accelerating track. This film never reaches that pace, wasting some of its best ideas to repeat some of its most superficial ones. Aja will recover, probably with the in-production Crawl 2. By then, we’ll all have put this film behind us.
This review was submitted by Fantastic Fest. The film is also in theaters now.
