Beneath its thin sci-fi veneer, its pedigree in middlebrow literature and its humorless Merchant Ivory tonality, this thing reveals itself as a shallow, clichéd chick flick that drags itself v-e-r-y slowly to a conclusion that's predictable not only because it's flashed at us at the start. The sci-fi premise, which can't be discussed in any detail without spoilers, is at least as old as Michael Chrichton's "Coma." But the storytelling is far more old-fashioned, reaching back to the weepy melodramas of the 19th century. Two girls and a boy who meet in a stereotypically menacing boarding school grow up as a tangled love triangle. As they drape and loll around glumly, we're reminded every frame that this is A TRAGEDY: every interior is dark and shadowy, every exterior a cloudy day, and every second of the film has morbid strings groaning and ululating underneath. All right, we get it! We're supposed to be sad! But we're not, because the three young people are such dull ciphers. The first act, when they're kids in the school, is the best. The kid actors are all surprisingly good, and a sense of foreboding and mystery builds for a little while -- until it crashes to a halt when one of the characters does a quick Basil Exposition and tells us, in a few short lines, pretty much the whole tale. Thus the 2nd and 3rd acts, where they're young adults, are anticlimactic and absolutely devoid of dramatic tension or narrative propulsion. After many slow, dark, rainy, shadowy, quiet scenes, the foregone conclusion is reached, the strings wail like a chorus of hired mourners, and it's over. Pffft.
Review of Never Let Me Go
