Never Let Me Go

This harrowing film is based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. A story of young people cloned to provide medical spare-parts for ‘real people’.

But the movie’s end concludes with a statement that is not from the book. The narrator sees rubbish on a fence and cotemplates the memories of people who now live only in her mind. Then she makes the observation that everything is transient and we have to get used to it.

The film here indulges in simplistic moralising. Ishiguro, however, is not crass enough to make this pedestrian point. He writes about loss, lamenting that we cannot escape our destiny. It is a bleak message, but not the film’s naïve philosophising.

Some American and left-wing critics panned the film because the central characters did not rebel against their fate, but accepted death calmly and resignedly. This is indeed a criticism of book and film. But perhaps it represents the resigned British sensibility that Ishiguro depicts so well in his books.

Besides this political critique, we may also make a spiritual critique – there is no transcendence, no yearning for more, but acceptance of a meaningless status quo. Though, in the present-day is this not so?