By Michelle B. Taylor
Each week I’ll be bringing you the only TV and film recaps you need to read, so stick with me and we’ll get through the fall season as a family! (Spoiler alert: Some plot twists are revealed.)
I didn’t expect much because I don’t expect much from Halle Berry. There, I said it. In all her years as an actress, even as an Academy Award-winning fixture in Hollywood, she still acts as someone putting on more than actually embodying the characters she takes on. For context, I still think her best role was as crack-addicted Vivian in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever. Listen, she did her thing alongside Samuel Jackson, ok? But she too often falls flat and relies heavily on being Halle Berry instead of digging deep into her bag of acting skills and pulling out a winning turn. Berry acts like Janet Jackson sings and we all accept it for what it is.
I support African American actors, though, and I was happy to see a mainstream horror film centered on a Black mama and her children making a way out of no way as they face evils that don’t include racism or poverty. So let’s dig in, shall we?
Never Let Go, directed by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), is a dark tale of a mother and her twin sons living in a secluded house in the middle of the woods surrounded by a terrifying “Evil.” They believe their home is the only safe place and if they stray too far away from it, especially without being tethered to one another by a rope, they will encounter “The Evil” that will possess them and turn them against each other. They make a daily promise to “never let go” of their ropes and each other.
From the beginning, you get the sense that there is more going on with this family than we know and that this isn’t your typical cabin-in-the-woods horror movie. It’s rather clear there is something psychiatrically wrong with the nameless mother (played by Berry). While one son, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins), is loyal to his mother and trusts everything she says about The Evil, Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), the younger twin, is skeptical and questions his mother’s behaviors. Perhaps being on the brink of starvation causes him to wonder why they can’t go beyond the lengths of their ropes to hunt for food, but he knows something is wrong. For one, she is the only one who ever actually sees “The Evil,” and it manifests in the form of reptilian versions of her mother and her late husband, both of whom we learn she killed due to them being possessed by “The Evil.”
As the harsh winter wears on and the food rations deplete, Mother decides she needs to kill their pet dog, Coda, so they can survive on his meat. This causes Nolan to defiantly stand his ground and demand that his mother accept the fact that what she believes is not real and leave their dog alive. It is at this point of the film that the audience is led to believe Mother has severe psychiatric disabilities and this entire world has been created as part of her psychosis. It gives you the same vibe as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, in which a hippie support group creates a world designed to mimic early colonial times in order to keep their families safe from the dangers of the world. It also reminds you of the A Quiet Place movie series where a mother protects her children in a scary world that limits their ability to live freely.
Here’s where the film veers off-track, and it’s unfortunate because there is so much that could have been explored with this premise. If it is about the “evils” of hallucinations and delusions caused by psychosis, Berry doesn’t quite capture the inner turmoil of someone living with these afflictions. She stays in one lane and focuses more on her portrayal of a protective mother than as a woman whose mind is playing the most evil of tricks on her.
The children, however, were stellar and are the heart and soul of the film. Jenkins (who also stars as a demonically-possessed child in Tyler Perry’s latest film The Deliverance) was extraordinary as a child who may or may not himself be possessed by “The Evil,” while Diggs shines bright as the skeptic-turned-savior who loves his family enough to fight for their survival. Berry exits the film about halfway through, so the two young actors carry the most exciting parts of the film, exhibiting promise of bright futures in Hollywood.
This could have been a commentary on disparities in mental health treatment, particularly among women and African Americans, and how much of a deterrent religiosity can be for many people to getting treatment. But they don’t go there, and I wish they had. If it’s about the “evil” of, say, our recent Covid-19 pandemic, as some viewers have suggested, the film doesn’t explore that enough. How did forced quarantining impact family dynamics and our collective psyche? The film had a ripe opportunity to explore it with the nuance it deserves, but it didn’t.
If the film is truly about an “evil” that has destroyed the entire world, the writers don’t do enough to convince us of that reality either. The script opens the door for logic, and Aja does what he can, but the film misses the mark in making us believe “The Evil” is real, leaving us more confused than convinced. Is it real? Did she kill her parents and husband because they were possessed by “The Evil” or because she is psychotic? There are too many mixed messages to draw any final conclusions. But maybe we’ve become too used to things being neatly tied up for us, so perhaps the objective is to get us to think about the possibilities and interpret them however we want.
My dissertation focuses on the depictions of Black mothers in cinema, so I am acutely aware of how depictions are, more often than not, degrading and skewed in ways that perpetuate harmful narratives about Black women. It was refreshing to see that a story that could have easily been cast with white actors allowed for the diversity of the human experience by bringing us a multicultural family. (Mother is biracial as is Berry). I just wished it had capitalized on opportunities to make more culturally relevant statements about how Black families navigate the “evils” of society.
Never Let Go is out now in a theater near you.
Girl, I love Halle Berry as a person--I just wish she would go back to that Vivian role as a crackhead in Jungle Fever and embrace that fearlessness more often. I think she leans too much into the pretty girl mode, and having met her, I know she is so much more than that.
I feel that a lot of the big name black actors are not that great and usually play the same character. Morgan Freeman, Samuel Jackson, and Denzel Washington come to mind. You can easily think of what roles they play, and they all blend together into one character. They are fine in their typical roles, but when they try to branch out, their lack of depth really shows. Does anyone remember when Samuel Jackson played a Violin Aficionado? That was the worst. (He was great in Pulp fiction, I gotta give him that.) If you want to see some great black actors on screen, check out American Fiction, a great movie. I also just re-watched Jacki Brown and Pam Grier was incredible.
Note: I criticize a lot of white actors of the same thing. But there are unfortunately so few black stars out there.