As beige as the cardies Carey Mulligan wears throughout, this has several quality elements, but there’s something vital missing.
When the emotional punch finally comes, it hits hard.
A beautifully realised adaptation of a profoundly affecting novel. Intelligent sci-fi provides the backdrop, while in the foreground is a trio of truly impressive performances from Mulligan, Knightley and Garfield.
The chief assets of Never Let Me Go are its actors.
The story is preposterous and unbelievable.
The film holds back from its full potential, faintly apologetic with what it’s pruning, and too conscious of itself (perhaps with half an eye on Joe Wright’s Atonement) as a tastefully middlebrow package.
Despite the heavy weather, Never Let Me Go never delivers a cloudburst of emotion or revelation, and yet it has ideas; it resists categorisation, and it lingers in the mind.
Trite observations on life and death.
Good telly but inferior cinema.
Lifting the gloom are the best of British performances from the lead trio, with Garfield especially good as the gentle soul forever reluctant to let go.
It's beautiful to look at, but as glum and dead as a flounder on a fishmonger's slab.
Garfield is convincing as the awkward, anguished Tommy but Knightley is less so as the sulky Ruth, leaving Mulligan to dominate as the compassionate and tear-stained Kathy.
The plot is dreary while the performances from Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley are vapid, with Mulligan required only to stare slack-jawed into space.
The end result is a low-key sci-fi film that's strange and sad.
Never Let Me Go doesn't leave you pondering the human condition, as some fans [of the book] have claimed, because no one in it behaves like a human being.
A brave film of some ambition.
Keira Knightley interview for Never Let Me Go
Send in the clones: the filming of Never Let Me Go
When 21st-century sci-fi meets human emotion
Could Never Let Me Go give human clones a good name?
This much I know: Kazuo Ishiguro
Interview: Carey Mulligan, actress
Face values
Interview: Mark Romanek, film director
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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