“Never Let Go”: Halle Berry is a protective mother in the horror film
Halle Berry plays a protective mother who protects her two sons from a dark and invading presence in the survival horror film “Never Let Go”.
Warning, spoilers! We discuss imajor plot points and the ending of Everything We Do (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
Halle Berry has been a mother for 16 years and is ready to unleash her “wild mama bear side” when needed, in real life or on screen in a terrifying survival situation.
In director Alexandre Aja’s Never Let Go, Berry’s character Momma goes to desperate lengths to protect herself and her two young sons from an evil she believes threatens to infect them. Does this evil actually exist, or is she imagining it all? Is it a film about mental health, or perhaps a grand metaphor about COVID? While the film keeps the audience guessing even after it ends, Berry will step in for Momma’s most difficult decisions every time.
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“I understand what it means to protect your children with all your might, even if it’s not the most popular decision,” says Berry. “But as a mother, you don’t care at all what people think about your role as a mother and the way you fight for your children.”
Since birth, children Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) have lived only in a remote cabin in the woods. Mama tells them that an evil has wiped out the rest of the world and this place is their only refuge – so much so that they use ropes to hunt for food, because if they come loose, they are vulnerable to possession.
Berry signed on to star and produce because the film explores “how complicated we are and how complicated our world is and how scary our world can be,” she says.
Does evil really exist? Or is Mama hallucinating in “Never Let Go”?
Evil presents itself to Mama as the creepy, split corpses of her parents and the children’s father, whom she apparently killed. And her children reflect “the best and the worst of everything in her,” Berry says. While Nolan begins to question the family’s isolation and wonder if evil really exists, Sam, like his mother, is willing to do whatever it takes – even if that means killing Sam’s beloved dog to avoid starving.
Mom doubts her own sanity, Berry says. “If evil is real, but it banishes you to this lonely life of living in a house with just your two sons, living off what the land provides, eating bugs, squirrels, worms and tree bark, wouldn’t you go crazy?”
But Berry’s character walks a fine line between protecting her children and torturing them. When they break free from the ropes (either accidentally or because they move outside their limited range of motion), Momma holds them at knifepoint and makes them say a prayer to make sure they don’t get infected, or locks them in a basement. “If one of them is touched, she has to eliminate them to protect the other and the well-being of the whole family,” Berry says.
Two-thirds of the way through the film, there’s a big scene where Momma is cornered by the evil version of her dead mother. (The black slime coming out of her mouth suggests Momma may have poisoned her.) Fearing she might be possessed and hurt her children, Momma takes a piece of glass and slits her throat with it.
“Whether she’s having these visions because she’s schizophrenic or suffering from a mental illness, we don’t know at this point. But whatever it is, to her it’s real,” says Berry. The scene raises an interesting question for the rest of the film: “What would these two little boys do without their fierce protector? How would they survive and would they survive? And would they ultimately find out if it was real or not? They had to go on this journey all on their own to come to these conclusions and answers themselves.”
The ending of the horror film “Never Let Go” is open to interpretation, and that is intentional
However, Everything We Do leaves a lot of room for the imagination. After their mother’s death, Nolan and Sam discover that there is another world out there full of people when they meet a hitchhiker and Sam kills him, believing him to be evil. Sam also turns against his brother, setting fire to the cabin while Nolan is locked in there and putting a smile on his face with a Polaroid. Nolan escapes and both are rescued by paramedics.
But just when you think evil isn’t real after all, the final scene shows Sam’s Polaroid with a supernatural hand in the picture.
“Depending on who you are, what you want the ending to be, what you think about the world and yourself in it, what your spiritual or religious beliefs are, all of that affects how everyone sees the ending,” says Berry. “The beauty of it is that it’s open-ended and we can all take from it what we think is the truth, because that’s life. We all see things differently. We all have different opinions. That’s what I love about it.”
