Evangelicals Now
Christian news worldwide
magnifying glass Search archives
home Home check the archives Archives Subscribe Subscriptions Advertising Information & booking of classifieds Adverts Find a local evangelical Church Find a church for the search engines and extremely curious! About us Contact us Site Map
Printable
Version

Never let me go

Are we modelled on trash?

NEVER LET ME GO
Director: Mark Romanek
Cert. 12A — contains moderate sex and nudity
Running Time: 103 minutes

If our identity is tied up in our origin and our destination, then who are we? This is a question to which our culture can find no meaningful answer. And it forms the heart of quietly devastating drama Never Let Me Go, based on Kazue Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel.

Science fiction only in the loosest sense, the story is set in an alternative 90s Britain where cloning technology has been perfected. The three central characters — Ruth (Keira Knightley), Cathy (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) — enjoy a privileged upbringing at an elite boarding school. But gradually, their impending dark fate is made clear to them and to the audience.

Strange human condition

Free from explosions or sensationalism, Never Let Me Go is less about medical ethics than it is about the strangeness of the human condition. In the scheme of things, we all have such a short time to work out who we are and what we want from life. We all must face the fact of our mortality, and try to make good choices in the light of it. Will we react in selfishness, as Ruth initially does? Like Cathy and Tommy, will we skirt fearfully around the things which really matter?

What we choose to make of our lives comes back to our beliefs about who, or what, we are. ‘We’re modelled on trash’, cries Ruth, in one of the film’s bleakest moments, echoing the voice of a real-world generation which must logically view humanity in just these terms. If the human race emerged from chaos and nothingness and will descend back into it again, what worth or purpose can we possibly have? We must even question, as one character puts it, whether we really ‘have souls at all’.

Never Let Me Go portrays people longing for transience in the face of despair. And, as such, it leads us into crucial conversations. Could God offer the rational foundation for meaning which our culture is searching for? Perhaps we are not ‘modelled on trash’ at all — but made in his image, and loved by him.

Sophie Lister,
writer and editor for Damaris