[rating=5]
Welcome to Hailsham boarding school. Beautifully secluded in the English countryside, Hailsham embodies all that is best in traditional British values: fair play, justice and a stiff upper lip. Hailsham children are the best and the brightest, the fit and fittest, meticulously prepared for adult life through a curriculum that favours artistic flair and physical rigour.
Born into the Halcyon halls of Hailsham are three friends: capricious Ruth, troubled Tommy and sensitive Kathy H. The adult Kathy’s occasional voiceover guides us through their idyllic childhood and later into adulthod but on closer inspection things are far from ideal. No parents ever visit, no parents ever write. The enigmatic Madame swans in from time to time to scrutinise the children’s artwork. Tokens are collected to buy donated trinkets and toys, but only Kathy seems to recognise the pathetic state of the broken dolls, the half set of draughts and the useless head of a recorder.
Why do the van drivers who bring this “bumper crop” look distressed? Why won’t they look the children in the eye? Do other schools have such stringent medical checks and their own state-of-the-art surgeries? What information to the scanner’s read when the students brush them without a second thought? How can they believe the terrible stories told to them by their teachers or “guardians” to stop them from leaving Hailsham’s grounds? Did a child really “Starve to death” and was another really found tied to a tree with their, “Hands and feet cut off”?
Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, is fraught with excellence. Euphemisms like “Completion” conjure up memories of “Logan’s Run” and Renewal, or “Blade Runner” and Retirement, but we are not in a domed world or a doomed one but a dull and dreary and normal England. Parked cars still miss hubcaps, American comedy shows till dominate our television and seaside cafes still serve sausage egg and chips.
And clones still donate their organs until they can’t any more.
“Never Let Me Go” is breathtakingly subtle filmmaking of the highest order. It’s Kubrick with the brakes on, the quiet of Japanese cinema relocated to this windswept Isle, a melancholy meditation on the human condition. It also features a triumvirate of riveting, compelling performances from Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Andrew Garfield as Tommy and Keira Knightly as Ruth.
It’s a pity their was no way of these 3 people to escape from this parallel world. In our galactic universe Earth, our society in the 31st century does not destroy non terran people. Our 31st century technology enables us to teleport people from one parallel universe to another. The Inter Galactic Federation Alliance court of justice located on Alpha Centauri Prime is in the process of drafting laws prohibiting societies in other parallel universes from terminating lives.