This report comes from Unbelievable Fest 2024, the annual style movie pageant in Austin, Texas. We’ll have extra reviews from the floor all through the fest.
Alexandre Aja’s gothic horror film Never Let Go is all about enjoying intelligent video games with viewers expectations. Halle Berry stars as a harried girl (in the credit, merely “Mama”) elevating two younger twins, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), in a rural forest cabin she sees as the household’s solely protection in opposition to “the Evil.” In her telling, the shape-changing, ever-present Evil has possessed everybody in the world besides her and her sons, and so they have to observe sure rituals to hold it at bay, together with remaining tied to the home’s foundations with thick rope in the event that they set foot exterior its partitions. Mama claims even a single contact from a manifestation of the evil will completely corrupt any of the members of the family.
Viewers are supposed to surprise from the film’s very starting whether or not June is actually the final bastion of hope, combating to save her children, or suffers from psychological sickness, and doing her finest to inculcate her delusions into her children. Sam and Nolan disagree on the challenge, which drives a big a part of the film’s battle. Both method, although, Berry instructed the viewers after a screening of the new movie at Unbelievable Fest, Mama is “fucking crazy.”
“Whatever you believe to be true after watching the movie, growing two children in a house in the middle of the woods all by yourself, you’ve been made crazy!” Berry stated. “That’s crazy-making, right? That’s fucking crazy-making. So at the end of the day, why she’s crazy isn’t the question, you know? It’s undeniable. She’s crazy. She’s been made crazy for some reason, whether born that way or made that way. She’s struggling to keep it all together.”
Berry stated that implied darkness — a character so broken by expertise that it doesn’t matter whether or not these experiences are inside or exterior — is what drew her to the film in the first place.
“I love anytime I get to lose myself inside of a character, and we get to forget who I am, and I get to put on this skin and the character of someone else,” she stated. “And it was really important, as Alex said when we first met — I talked about not losing the darkness of Mama. I’ve played other mother roles, and I’ve always been that mother who’s been fighting for her children, and she’s been very relatable. And for me, this was a different mother. I wanted to lean into the complexity of a mother.”
At one level in the film, viewers get a powerful trace that Mama was abused as a baby, whereas different components recommend that psychological sickness runs in her household, and that if she’s delusional, it’s a delusion that will have been handed down from a earlier era. Nonetheless, Berry identified, it’s clear that Mama loves and is devoted to Sam and Nolan, even when that love is harming them.
“All of her complexity and her darkness aside, I connected to that feeling of being a parent, birthing two children,” Berry stated. “What connected me to this mother and this world was a beautiful tapestry to put on display, what it is to be a mother in any circumstance. And that’s why when I read the script and I heard Alex was directing, I was like, ‘Yes, sign me up.’”
Never Let Go is in theaters now.
