Never Let Go's Tenuous Bonds 

NEVER LET GO. Let me begin by opening myself up to scorn and ridicule: We need to give Halle Berry another crack at the role of Catwoman. Her action work in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) and Bruised (2020), in which her fighting chops (in her damn 50s) were equaled by her portrayal of a ferociously broken woman, are enough evidence she can redeem one of the most widely scorned comic book adaptations of all time. DC can keep cranking out grim antihero movie after movie, but maybe we let Joaquin Phoenix eat something while the rest of us enjoy an older, more complex Catwoman pouncing around Gotham and pulling off heists in a far better costume than they gave her in 2004? Think it over and come back to me when you realize I'm right.

A more readily available example of Berry's range and talents is the Spooky Season opener Never Let Go. An immersive, tense and deceptively straightforward horror movie, it establishes the clearest of roles and rules, then allows us to see how tenuous the stability and security of those things are.

There is precious little rest to be had in Never Let Go, which sends us ghastly apparitions almost as soon as we set foot in the lush, dark woods a mother and her young boys, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), hunt and forage, each with a rope tied around their waist, tethering them to the old house they share. The ropes, Momma has taught them, keep them connected to the house's protective powers, guarding them from the touch of the Evil outside. They follow rituals of prayer to the house for protection, purifying themselves in a locked crawlspace at its heart and chanting promises to keep hold of their ropes each time they dare step off the porch. Theirs is the last refuge from the Evil, which has destroyed the rest of the world from which they are isolated, turning people against one another and making them kill each other. Fair enough. But when one of the boys accidentally slips his rope in a fall and isn't immediately possessed by dark forces, the seeds of doubt begin to grow for Samuel. Little else is growing, though, and the threat of starvation looms inside their refuge as the children grapple with doubt. Momma struggles to keep them alive and following the rules, while haunted by terrors disguised as loved ones.

Directed by horror veteran Alexandre Aja (2003 rural slasher High Tension and 2019's swampy gator horror Crawl), the scares are real, even if we're unsure what else is. The forked black tongue twisting from a pale, bloated face is at once otherworldly and of a piece with a rundown greenhouse or a rotting log. The camera scans slowly around the wood, every shadow and leaf suspect to imagination, sudden nightmare images popping up in the calm and odd, domestic artifacts cropping up among the roots and bark. That's the visual part, anyway. The script leaves the characters and the audience — everyone but Momma — room enough for doubt that we don't know what to hope for. Escape to find other people? Stay on the porch? Stop pulling the rope so damn hard?

That Berry moves so beautifully between panic, rage and beatific love should not surprise us, but it's a rare and wonderful thing to see such range in a horror movie, where too often effects and build-up take up all the space. In giving Momma room to feel everything from violent fear of her own child to dreamily swaying along to a record with her boys, Berry and Aja give her dimension. Even when there's nary a monster in sight, it's Berry's expressions that turn the world around them into something to fear.

Likewise, Daggs and Jenkins (from whose eyes I kept seeing the ghost of Michael K. Williams) are remarkable, embodying fully formed characters, the likes of which seldom show up on screen. As they vacillate between doubt and faith, resentment and love, their turmoil is as gripping as any grown character's and their ability to carry the film's last act is astonishing.

There's much to be mined in the themes of family, the terror of letting go of each other, as we all must do eventually, and love (rather than good) as the true enemy of evil. None of it is easily delineated — we must work our way through it like these characters, hoping more than knowing. R. 101M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.

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