15 Years Later, Never Let Me Go Still Devastates
Britain gave us the saddest, but most honest, science fiction film of the century.
British dystopia spares no bleakness. The genre is not known for its optimism, but in dystopian stories from the United Kingdom, the country’s history of austerity, suppression of radicals, and rigid hierarchy feel especially pronounced and depressing, often without needing the outsized spectacle of Hollywood sci-fi. Traumatizing television films like Threads speculated on nuclear armageddon, while literary adaptations like A Clockwork Orange and 1984 revealed the desolation of paranoid authoritarians trying to “correct” their subjects. And even though Children of Men was the rare visceral and cinematic dystopian thriller set in England, this equated to a constant, smothering sense of dread and despair, making its final, bittersweet image of hope all the more precious and poignant.
British dystopia often abstracts modern society into a devolved or fortified version of our current reality, but rarely tries to style itself as an exact mirror — or alternate vision of the past. With Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel released 15 years ago, British sci-fi got as close as possible to replicating its punishing but mundane society with fidelity and honesty — especially in how it shows the dangerous but normalized ways Britain discriminates between the value of its citizens’ lives. This supremely subdued cloning drama underlines a central, honest tenet of science fiction: technology is far more likely to worsen disparities between societal groups than repair them.
Set in an alternate history of postwar Britain, Never Let Me Go charts the lives of Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Ruth (Keira Knightley) who spend a sheltered childhood inside the walls of Hailsham, a boarding school. They are “donors,” cloned humans raised to provide healthy organs to sick Brits, and multiple donations will inevitably make them too sick to live. This type of demise is called “completion,” and the only ways to delay it are to become a carer for donors or — if rumors are to be trusted — falling in love, proving their soulfulness by presenting a childhood’s worth of artwork, and deferring their scheduled donations by a couple years. It is not a happy life, and the donors live life on the margins — subject to suspicious glances from regular, healthy people and forced to gawk at glimpses of regular life in shops, restaurants, and on television screens.
Director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) and screenwriter Alex Garland are not completely alien to romance or optimism, but the emotion that seeps through their cold, exact style is always tinged with melancholy and doom. There are no gruesome or explicit dissections in Never Let Me Go; dying is characterized by pallid skin, fragile bodies, and a lot of grimacing in pain. Equally, there is no catharsis — either lasting or temporary — for donors trapped by their linear fate: Tommy’s storyline is bookended by him screaming in helpless anger, and venting his frustration as an adult just as unproductively as when he was a child. Kathy and Ruth spend their young adult lives snipping at each other and feuding over Tommy’s affection to a degree they wouldn’t do if they had the chance to meet more people and live unencumbered, expansive lives.
Never Let Me Go is anchored by equally terrific turns from Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield.
By sticking so close to the clones’ perspective, Never Let Me Go denies us insight into the lives that are healthy because of the donor’s sacrifice, which has the effect of abandonment and apathy lingering in every scene. We are told that life expectancy has shot up to over 100, that seemingly incurable diseases are no longer a threat, but the clones aren’t allowed to benefit from this miraculous technology — because they themselves are the technology, and their suffering is necessary to prop up the nation.
The alternate Britain we glimpse throughout the film (Never Let Me Go takes place between 1978 and 1994) doesn’t look noticeably futuristic — it’s not like this life-extending cloning process has created an instant utopia. Kathy navigates a country that is not necessarily more advanced, but is functioning more healthily than Britain could in the second half of the 20th century. This is still a world of scarcity; there is still disparity between those with the most comfort and security and those who are structurally prohibited from prospering. There’s a depressing honesty to Ishiguro, Garland and Romanek’s view of speculative technology breakthroughs; in order to succeed, the healthy would be raised above a new tier of sick and fragile bodies.
Clones like Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are designated as less valuable and deserving members of society, and Never Let Me Go tracks their resigned acceptance of having a diminished experience of life, meekly questioning if the trade-off is worth it. It ultimately doesn’t matter whether or not the clones have no souls — no-one cares about their capacity for humanity when they exist solely as a function, the only proven and desirable gateway to a brave and healthy new world. Never Let Me Go offers a different shade of bleakness to the British dystopia; not speculation, but a plain-faced diagnosis. When we use technology to further separate one group from another, it makes our society sicker, our nation’s scars more permanent.
