Short Review: Never Let Me Go (2010)

Having already been labeled an early season casualty - a surplus of cold, disenchanted reactions and a mild box-office turnout in is wake - I was surprised to find that Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go isn't an entirely suffocating British weeper, it's science-fiction baseline given a caring, methodically dour sensibility that slowly envelopes the viewer - if a bit unconvincingly. 

Adam Kimmel's pastel-colored lensing and the performances of Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield chiefly stand out as highlights - the realist, quiet submission of the former and the manic, moody hopefulness of the latter carrying whatever emotional impact the film has, which is admittedly rather mute for a good portion. 

It's essentially an elegiac poem of longing, forbidden love, inevitability and slow, protracted suffering - it doesn't ever really turn a corner and offer any retribution or salvation or discovery, and as such, is something that just sort of floats away - from screen and from memory. [B-]