How Is Halle Berry Battling Demons This Boring?

Alexandre Aja has as many horror hits (High Tension, Piranha 3D, Crawl) as misses (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, Horns), and while Never Let Go, which hits theaters Sept. 20, doesn’t belong in the former category, it’s also far from a fiasco.

The French genre auteur knows how to build supernatural suspense, and he does so with his usual visual panache and solid pacing throughout his latest, about a family avoiding a malevolent menace in a remote forest. What’s missing, however, is a payoff worthy of his set-up, resulting in a diverting thriller that drags its way to an underwhelming finale.

In the middle of dense, tangled woodlands, Momma (Halle Berry) lives in an old wooden house with her twin sons Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). The reason for their isolation is that Momma claims a wicked entity known as “the evil” lurks outside the walls of their home. Fortunately, their abode was blessed by her grandfather, as were the ropes that she uses to tether herself to her kids whenever they venture outside on hunting and foraging excursions. One touch from the evil is enough to result in possession, so the rule they all live by is to “never let go” of the rope lest they court infection and doom.

This sounds batty, and the early sight of Momma encountering a zombie-like ghoul in the dark, only to have it suddenly vanish, implies that perhaps this situation is a byproduct of her delusional mind. Never Let Go teases this possibility for virtually its entire runtime, and that uncertainty lends it, at least at first, moderate intrigue.

Berry’s haunted performance does likewise, her eyes sunken and encircled by dark rings, and her hair as frazzled as her demeanor. Berry’s mother is devoted to her children and zealous about adhering to her guidelines, and the growing tension between those two impulses amplifies as the clan’s circumstances become more precarious.

Momma’s kids are intensely loyal to her and each other, but Nolan suspects that perhaps everything isn’t as it seems. This is underscored by an outing into the woods—where they scavenge for bugs, frogs, and other edible critters—during which he accidentally steps on Samuel’s rope, causing it to untie and sending him sprawling down an embankment, breaking his ankle. Momma furiously races to save the boy from a heavyset female phantom in a muumuu whose tongue is forked like a serpent. Though she’s successful, Never Let Go raises doubt about this predator’s existence via the revelation that only Momma can see these specters, which introductory narration indicates have appeared to her over the years in various forms.

Liane Hentscher/Lionsgate

Aja’s prologue, chapter cards, twinkly score, and references to Little Thumb and Hansel and Gretel all position Never Let Go as a fairy tale, and that atmosphere goes some way toward compensating for a decided lack of terror.

Increasingly hungry once the animals depart for the season (thus denying Samuel the chance to kill more squirrels with his trusty slingshot), the trio resorts to scraping bark of trees and frying it in a pan, with sap as the condiment meant to make it go down easier.

This is obviously a dire state of affairs, and not improved by Momma’s mounting anxiety. Following Samuel’s injury, Momma sticks both kids in a space beneath her floorboards, where they’re expected to expel the “darkness.” She additionally has them recite prayers about the house’s protective powers, and stubbornly refuses to engage with the ghosts that trouble her, including an old silent man (her father, presumably) and her ex-husband, who promises, “I’m going to make you eat your babies.”

Once again collaborating with favorite cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, Aja enhances his action with silky camerawork and at least a couple of jump scares. Never Let Go, however, goes so light on actual horror that it gradually loses its momentum.

This is largely due to the film’s premise; since Momma is the sole character capable of seeing the evil, and she’s too diligent about her rules to stray from her safe path, any run-ins with the undead (or whatever they are) prove few and far between. Once starvation becomes a pressing threat, Momma is forced to make a decision that certainly elicits a bit of theater-seat squirming. Alas, Aja pulls his punches, and the subsequent calamity that unfolds is rather mundane, even if questions about the evil remain until the final frame.

Jenkins and Daggs are more than capable of handling the dramatic workload demanded by Never Let Go, delivering turns that are harried, empathetic, and free of affectation. Often front and center, they ground the proceedings in believable emotional terrain, especially in its latter passages, when Nolan’s hunch that Momma is nuts and society isn’t in ruins drives him to take drastic measures to force a confrontation with reality. Aja may largely quit trying to unnerve his audience, but he makes up for it by fixating closely on his adolescent actors, thereby casting the material as a Grimms-style fable about trust, duty, madness, and togetherness.

Nonetheless, Never Let Go feels half-baked, especially as it wends its way past its central catastrophe and toward its end game. Having deftly set up their scenario, Aja and screenwriters Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby don’t bother to thrust their protagonists into enough peril—a decision that’s undoubtedly driven by their desire to keep viewers guessing about the evil. Formally speaking, the film maintains its eerie polish from start to finish. Yet without a stunning sight or any shocking grotesqueness to rattle the nerves, it ultimately just shuffles along toward revelations that are flimsily fantastical.

Aja is one of contemporary genre cinema’s few directors who strive, with each new offering, to do something novel in the horror realm, so Never Let Go’s unwillingness to push the boundaries of its central conceit is surprising and disheartening. It’s rarely dull and occasionally beguiling, but its inability to follow through in gripping or unique fashion—instead falling back on twists reminiscent of multiple movie predecessors—neuters whatever mild interest it initially generated.