15 Years Before ’28 Years Later,’ Its Writer Went Against His Usual Style for This Devastating Sci-Fi Drama

Whether you read this statement as a positive or negative is up to you, but Alex Garland is an extremely prickly filmmaker. Love him or hate him, he has a proven track record of sneaking heady philosophical debates under the guise of intensely realized genre fare. Whether as the writer of Sunshine or 28 Years Later, or as the full-fledged auteur creator of Ex Machina or Civil War, Garland has a tendency of antagonizing his audience on a sensory level while sneakily stimulating them on an intellectual level. If any film on his resume seems like an outlier, it would be his script for Never Let Me Go, a coming-of-age romantic drama that lacks any of the ghoulish fights for existential survival that’s usually the bedrock of his narratives, but still finds a way to play with his signature fixations.

What is ‘Never Let Me Go’ About?

Ruth, Tommy and Kathy, played by Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan, stand by a river looking somber in Never Let Me Go. — Image via 20th Century Fox

Adapted from the novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by music video genius Mark Romanek, Never Let Me Go seemingly owes less to Garland’s freakazoid spiritualism and more to the lushly erudite Merchant-Ivory productions of the 1980s and early 1990s. Softly blanketed in an intentionally misleading nostalgic fuzz, it tells the story of a boarding school where all the children are clones bred to be organ donors, with the children unaware of their fate. When they reach a certain age, they’re allowed a trip to experience the outside world before they learn the truth, which is the fate of Ruth (Keira Knightley), Kathy (Carey Mulligan), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield).

Jamie aiming a bow and arrow in 28 Years Later

Every Movie Written by Alex Garland, Ranked

28 screenplays later.

Their pastoral road trip will let them see the beauty in the mundane everyday existence of local townsfolk, only to have their emotional naivety rocked by an unexpected love triangle where Kathy and Tommy discover burgeoning feelings while Ruth interferes in the dynamic with her own feelings for Tommy. Don’t let the placid scenery and sense of youthful adventure fool you: this is one of those films guaranteed to utterly break your heart and leave you a sobbing mess, which isn’t something you would often say about Alex Garland’s films.

‘Never Let Me Go’ Lets Garland Interrogate Belief Systems

Garland’s films often exhibit a quiet mortification at what humans will do to each other for the sake of holding on to their identity when subjected to social systems that actively tear apart their humanity. Rather than use overt religious systems, Garland usually questions humanity’s reliance on belief systems as they’re represented in human-made social structures, which usually leads to headspinning climaxes that are graphic in their violence and bleak in their outlook. While Never Let Me Go has none of those excitements and purports itself to be much more tender in its tonality, it still essentially asks its three protagonists to come to grips with realizing that the vision of life they were raised in is a lie, and that their “purpose” for living is coldly utilitarian. The boarding school might not have the same level of deep and mysterious lore as the village in Men, but it harbors the same skeleton closet of promising lives thrown into a metaphysical meat grinder to uphold the self-imposed status quo. While love triangles are often cliché tripe, Garland uses that genre convention to expose the emotional violence that the boarding school system has aggravated by conditioning these kids to be totally unprepared for how to handle this delicate dynamic.

‘Never Let Me Go’ Is In Line With Garland’s Life Philosophy

Maybe it’s fitting that the one film in Alex Garland’s filmography built most directly on human intimacy and romance, a thing meant to heal and nourish people, is one that ultimately uses love to hurt its characters and the audience. No matter how much Kathy may yearn for Tommy, how much Tommy wails and rages at his destiny, how much Ruth battles deeply fragile insecurity, it won’t change anything. Thanks to the exceptionally devastating performances by Mulligan, Knightley, and Garfield, Garland’s writing dodges the typical allegations that he’s an empty edgelord and instead achieves a humanist poignancy in its evocation of how we all must find ways to meaningfully fill our time until we meet our inevitable end. While no doubt condemning the banal evil at the core of the boarding school, it approaches the rationale for why it would be allowed to exist with a wistful acceptance in the vein of “well, that’s life for you.” That’s reminiscent of the way Garland approaches concepts like cosmically-influenced evolution in Annihilation or the casual loss of life in Warfare, an unblinking embrace of the unknowable parts of the human psyche that can look into the void and go “alright then.” Never Let Me Go seems like a much more heartfelt experienced compared to his more extremely f***ed-up fare, but it’s no less willingly abrasive in its refusal to look away from the uncomfortable truths of trying to be a fully-formed human.