Review: A mother warns of terrors in ‘Never Let Go,’ but monsters are sometimes closer to home

The new Alexandre Aja film, “Never Let Go,” is billed as a psychological thriller and sports a trailer that makes it look like a ghost story. Halle Berry stars as a troubled mother living what seems to be a postapocalyptic existence deep in the woods with her two young sons. She fends off mysterious creatures, ensuring the family’s safety by remaining tethered to their crumbling wooden cabin with ropes in a ritual that’s either superstitious or supernatural.

But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill haunting flick. “Never Let Go” reveals itself to be one of the most shockingly bleak American genre films in recent memory, though perhaps that’s not so surprising coming from a French director initially associated with the New French Extremity, who was named as a part of the “Splat Pack” of up-and-coming horror directors in the early aughts. Aja’s breakthrough feature, “High Tension,” delivered stylized hyper-violence, and he’s known for gleefully campy creature features like “Crawl” and “Piranha 3D,” but “Never Let Go” is a turn toward more somber storytelling.

As we immediately start to suspect (and as many YouTube commenters have already surmised), the “evil” warned of and warded off by Momma (Berry) in “Never Let Go” is all in her head (or is it?). Young Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) starts to question his mother’s methods and rules for their life together: the ropes and their ritualistic blessings, periods of time spent trapped in a small cellar praying on “love” and “evil.”

But Momma’s the only one who can see the zombie-like ghosts of her dead mother and husband, and her sons need to take it on faith that she’s keeping them safe, even as their supplies dwindle. Because it seems so obvious what’s actually going on, all suspense is drained from this story and it becomes a grim endurance test, watching a mother abuse her starving children with her psychosis.

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It also doesn’t help that the script, by K.C. Coughlin and Ryan Grassby, is excessively wordy. It opens with Nolan’s voice-over, which harks to “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” another film about young Black children in the wilderness (though that film embraced magical realism to triumph over challenging circumstances). This narration runs throughout, explaining what Nolan and his brother, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins), have been taught by their mother about how they exist in relationship to the house, how there’s no outside world left for them. Exposition comes in speeches and conversations, as well as chapter titles that unnecessarily state obvious themes, with less emphasis on visual storytelling.

The style is evocative and creepy, thanks to rich production and costume design, the cramped house seemingly lost in time, surrounded by a damp, mossy forest. With its themes of isolation and family manipulation, it starts to feel like “Dogtooth” meets “The Village,” only with more abject suffering.

Sound does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the jump scares, although almost immediately we learn to distrust what we hear. Aja has a knack for mood and tone, and the spectral camerawork is unnerving, but there’s an inconsistency to the visual rules of this world, which is somewhat surprising for a story that has such clear delineations about how things work for this family (the ropes, the prayers, the spiritual cleansing). When it comes to the terrifying visions, it all gets a bit muddy as to who sees what and why.

Certainly, there is a metaphorical nature to the imagery, requiring a suspension of disbelief even if everything doesn’t quite tie together in the end. But Daggs turns in a sophisticated performance for such a young actor, and Jenkins is equal parts devastating and menacing.

Nonetheless, “Never Let Go” becomes an unpleasant slog for much of its runtime. It’s never enjoyable to see innocents mistreated or threatened, and there are a series of miserable sequences in the middle of the film that are almost unbearable to watch, without any kind of meaning or payoff to make them make sense.

It’s bold to see an American film be this unapologetically dark with regard to children and animals, and it feels more like a dreary and stark Eastern European film than a spooky-season thriller. While that may work for some, for others, it will be a surprise, and not in a good way.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.