Halle Berry Survives the Woods in Never Let Go‘s Unreliable Horror Folktale

“We’re the world now.” That’s what a mother (Halle Berry) tells her twin sons Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) in Never Let Go, and maybe it’s not as grandiose as it sounds. Though the movie is not explicitly or maybe even implicitly about the pandemic, the events of the last five years do provide a plausible reason to not immediately doubt the mom’s claim. Plenty may well identify with the scary simplicity of forcibly shoving the rest of the world out of mind in order to survive in one of our own (attempted) making. That, and Halle Berry has played some fiercely protective moms in her time; who are we to doubt her sincerity?

Sincerity isn’t really the issue in Never Let Go anyway – though the movie does nevertheless sow seeds of doubt about the state of the world early on, which helpfully mitigates the initial, sinking feeling that it’s teeing up an obvious twist. Nolan, Samuel and their mom live in an isolated cabin, and are only permitted to enter the surrounding woods when tied to a lengthy series of ropes, tethering them to their home at all times and distances. An overhead shot observes the three family members’ ropes diverging as they set out in search of food, which seems to be growing scarce. Throughout the film, the way the ropes coil and tangle through the brush blends eerily into the mise en scène, making them look like snakes or gnarled roots.

Supposedly, this protects everyone by literally tying them to a blessed home. Early on, Never Let Go offers a glimpse of what happens when that connection is severed: In the woods, a zombie-like figure creeps toward the family as if wandering in from an apocalypse just off-screen. Her forked tongue darts from a black-gunk mouth. The movie also then makes clear what this same situation looks like to the kids in the scene, even as they huddle against their mother in fear: Absolutely nothing. Their mother sees “the evil,” as she calls it, while the children must take it, and her ongoing protection of them, on faith. This makes the family’s daily survival routine look more like an ongoing ritual. Maybe, per mom, the only one left in the world.

The tension of Never Let Go doesn’t derive wholly from whether a mother is deceiving her children, or even from how “real” the monsters in the woods are. Sometimes, the tension doesn’t derive from much of anything; there are periods where the movie stews in its woodsy-gothic atmosphere perhaps too long, letting Berry do her protective monologues and dire warnings without much variety. Quiet, menacing contemplation is not always a strength of horror director Alexandre Aja, but versatility is; his previous movie was a single-location sci-fi thriller called Oxygen, preceded by the creature feature Crawl; he’s also done supernatural and comedic variations on the genre. Some of his movies have truly gnarly gore, and one of the finer touches in Never Let Go is actually its strategic gratuity – how some small but appreciably nasty bits of business squirm their way into a story that doesn’t strictly require them. It’s not CG splatter to impress the gorehounds, either, but something cracklier and weirder: At one point, a kid pops a little frog into his mouth and chews it right up. There’s a less gross but still-vivid grit to the later scene where the family scrapes bark from trees, and mom attempts to fry it up for dinner. It almost feels like something out of David Gordon Green.

Why they can’t find better sustenance isn’t precisely explained. There’s a fair amount that Never Let Go leaves either ambiguous, or perhaps conveniently untouched; it’s not always easy to analyze the decisions of a movie that’s not as neatly composed, either on the screen or the page, as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, which it sometimes broadly resembles. That Aja’s project is the messier of the two isn’t always a drawback; even when the conflation of parental fealty and quasi-religious fervor feels familiar, the movie strays from predictability. Daggs and Jenkins don’t overplay their compare-contrast sibling relationship, recognizing that two same-aged kids in this situation would share plenty of common ground. Berry, for her part, subverts fierce-mom stereotypes with conviction.

The movie’s lack of a clearly defined villain might alienate some genre fans; so might the lack of an easily trackable metaphor. Others will find it a relief. Never Let Go is a horror movie more interested in what it can evoke than what it can state or even imply. It’s especially appropriate for a story often seen from a child’s point of view, where the kids are forced to figure out what kind of folktale they might be living through, twisting in on itself like those tree roots. Aja’s recent films have dealt with physical confinements; this one is unsettlingly unsure about how or where its confinements will end, and whether or not that’s the scarier option.

Director: Alexandre Aja
Writers: Kevin Coughlin, Ryan Grassby
Stars: Halle Berry, Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B. Jenkins
Release Date: September 20, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.