This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more reports from the ground throughout the fest.
Alexandre Aja’s gothic horror movie Never Let Go is all about playing clever games with audience expectations. Halle Berry stars as a harried woman (in the credits, simply “Mama”) raising two young twins, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), in a rural forest cabin she sees as the family’s only defense against “the Evil.” In her telling, the shape-changing, ever-present Evil has possessed everyone in the world except her and her sons, and they have to observe certain rituals to keep it at bay, including remaining tied to the house’s foundations with thick rope if they set foot outside its walls. Mama claims even a single touch from a manifestation of the evil will permanently corrupt any of the family members.
Viewers are intended to wonder from the movie’s very beginning whether June is really the last bastion of hope, fighting to save her kids, or suffers from mental illness, and doing her best to inculcate her delusions into her kids. Sam and Nolan disagree on the issue, which drives a significant part of the movie’s conflict. Either way, though, Berry told the audience after a screening of the new film at Fantastic Fest, Mama is “fucking crazy.”
“Whatever you believe to be true after watching the movie, growing two children in a house in the middle of the woods all by yourself, you’ve been made crazy!” Berry said. “That’s crazy-making, right? That’s fucking crazy-making. So at the end of the day, why she’s crazy isn’t the question, you know? It’s undeniable. She’s crazy. She’s been made crazy for some reason, whether born that way or made that way. She’s struggling to keep it all together.”
Image: Lionsgate Films/Everett Collection
Berry said that implied darkness — a character so damaged by experience that it doesn’t matter whether those experiences are internal or external — is what drew her to the movie in the first place.
“I love anytime I get to lose myself inside of a character, and we get to forget who I am, and I get to put on this skin and the character of someone else,” she said. “And it was really important, as Alex said when we first met — I talked about not losing the darkness of Mama. I’ve played other mother roles, and I’ve always been that mother who’s been fighting for her children, and she’s been very relatable. And for me, this was a different mother. I wanted to lean into the complexity of a mother.”
At one point in the movie, viewers get a strong hint that Mama was abused as a child, while other elements suggest that mental illness runs in her family, and that if she’s delusional, it’s a delusion that may have been passed down from a previous generation. Still, Berry pointed out, it’s clear that Mama loves and is devoted to Sam and Nolan, even if that love is harming them.
“All of her complexity and her darkness aside, I connected to that feeling of being a parent, birthing two children,” Berry said. “What connected me to this mother and this world was a beautiful tapestry to put on display, what it is to be a mother in any circumstance. And that’s why when I read the script and I heard Alex was directing, I was like, ‘Yes, sign me up.’”
Never Let Go is in theaters now.