Never Let Go * * ½

Give 'em enough rope.

Here's a horror movie that looks like it was inspired by two of the most celebrated horror movie directors working today - M.Night Shy Amalan and Ari Aster , so you know it's going to be shit.

True to the school of the above directors it's a stupid idea with grandiose pretentions, and it assumes viewers are idiots. It's an English language film set in America but its directed by Frenchman Alexandre Aje who is actually very competent and should know better than to take on a half baked screenplay like this.

A cabin in the woods.  A woman and her two young sons are frightened to leave because the world is full of evil. Nevertheless they have to eat - obviously.  So she has devised a method where they tie a rope around themselves and that rope is tethered to the house.  That way they can haul each other back if anything goes wrong. Also, she has told them that if they are tethered to the house, they are tethered to the good, so the evil can't get them. 

That's okay. I can go with that, but that's pretty well all it has to offer, except they are running out of food. I don't know why they can't grow vegies in the garden or why they can't catch wild life with her cross bow, but there you go.  So they have been living off bugs and beetles and frogs, and even scraping bark off the trees to fry up. I must say they all look remarkably healthy despite their diet.

Anyway, one of the boys begins to have doubts about this "evil" thing that Mum keeps going on about and that's when trouble starts.

Although she is a caring and protective Mum in her own whacky way, in some ways this is a miserable story bordering on child abuse, especially as your sense of logic aligns more and more with one of the boys and you begin to see things from his perspective.  Though I couldn't quite figure out whether one of the kids is dreaming up half the film when he is locked in a box under the floorboards.

It stars Halle Berry who does her best as do the two young boys. They are all good actors.

It throws up the odd silly shock (you know skeletons and the like), and shows us Mum's messed up imagination of her own dead Mum and husband, but overall it's not very scary and not very clever.  The ending simply confirms what anybody could see coming all along. It was just a matter of waiting for it to arrive, which seemed to take an awful long time despite it's ninety minute running time.