There is no worse person to be stuck in an apocalypse with than a child. Show me a kid in an apocalypse movie, and I will show you an adult standing next to that kid who is about to die. An interesting apocalypse movie might be one in which a protagonist passes through various settlements, some of which have kids, some of which don’t, and we see what it really takes to keep a kid alive in an apocalypse, because it seems like a fool’s errand to me. All that is to say: Halle Berry is stuck in an apocalypse with two kids. She’s probably about to die.
Never Let Go comes from French filmmaker Alexandre Aja, whose work has a 50-50 hit rate with me. I like Furia, Piranha 3D (well done schlocky fun!), Maniac, Horns, and Crawl (Kaya Scodelario versus an alligator), but I hate High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, The Pyramid, and The 9th Life of Louis Drax. So I can’t tell how Never Let Go will break until I see it, but the setup is that Halle Berry’s character lives in the woods with two kids, and they can’t leave their house without being secured by long ropes. If they let go of the ropes, they are vulnerable to an unseen threat. There are shades of Birdbox and A Quiet Place, but also a little bit of The Babadook, casting doubt on the reality of the monster, maybe it’s just mental illness.
It's Alexandre Aja, so it’s probably an actual monster. Highbrow films he does not make. But I am interested to see him take on the post-apocalyptic kid trope. I wonder if he’ll have the guts to kill one of the kids? I appreciate that about A Quiet Place, that it opens by showing how hard it is to keep a kid, especially a little one who doesn’t really grasp the situation, alive in an apocalypse. Horror movie kids are basically death knells anyway, but the post-apocalyptic kid is sure to get every adult around them killed.
