Never Let Me Go

In many respects, Never Let Me Go is a very simple film. It is a movie about a tragic love triangle between three doomed individuals. But that simplicity is deceptive. In fact, it is a far more complex film that it might first appear. Because the background scenario - the dystopian society that provides the backdrop and the reason as to why the leading trio are doomed - is simultaneously fascinating and frightening. And yes, there are spoilers ahead.

The trio at the heart of the story are donors - not those who volunteer to donate organs after their demise, but rather human clones who are bred to provide replacement organs for real humans. And those organs are removed while the donors still live -organ by organ until the donor can no longer survive and they die. Their whole lives are laid out for them, and the donors know that they will die on an operating table giving their vital organs to those deemed to be more important than them.

In part, the film is about what it means to be human. The donors - bred to be internally cannibalised - are effectively human. They feel; they love, they argue, they hope and they fear. They create. In what way are they different from other humans? Is it simply they were bred to be spare parts and then conditioned to accept that fate? But it is about more than just the question of whether the donors are human, since the film also posits the implicit question of "how human is a society that breeds fellow humans to slowly kill them in a cold, clinical and bureaucratic way?"

As such, this film is in part a tragic romance, in part a dystopian fantasy. But it is also an very unlikely but also compelling horror movie, rather like In The Loop (albeit for different reasons). The horror isn't blatant or in-your-face; rather, it hangs in the atmosphere but is everywhere. The film features people born to die and while one of the characters muses that everyone completes (the film's term for dying), these people aren't just born to die, they are born to be killed and their organs systematically harvested. Furthermore, there are constant hints at just how inhumane this society has become. Hailsham - one of the schools that educate the donors - is perceived by one of its leading staff members as a last bastion of ethical behaviour towards the donors. It cares about whether they are human or not. But even as it asks that question it still grooms these children not to question; to be compliant little donors. It is complicit in the systematic slaughter of numerous people in society. Furthermore, it is suggested that Hailsham has closed towards the end of the film, and that the newer schools for clones are really just battery farms. Humans clones as battery hens, bred by a society that would rather ignore them until it needs their organs. And clones so indoctrinated and convinced of their own fate that they do not run and do not flee; the closest they come to such an aspiration is wanting to defer their first donation because they have found love. Hell, even the bland wording for the process are haunting; "donations" for the harvesting of organs, "completion" for what is effectively murder at the hands of the National Donor Programme. This is a dystopian future, and we see it through the dystopia's victims.

Never Let Me Go is touching, sinister and thought-provoking in equal measure and, as such, is well worth watching.