This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll have more on-site reports throughout the festival.
Alexandre Aja’s gothic horror film Never let go is all about cleverly playing with audience expectations. Halle Berry plays a haunted woman (simply “Mama” in the credits) raising her two twins, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), in a remote woodland cabin that she sees as the family’s only defense against “evil.” According to her narrative, shape-shifting, omnipresent evil has taken possession of everyone in the world except herself and her sons, and they must observe certain rituals to keep it at bay, including remaining tied to the foundation of the house with a thick rope if they set foot outside its walls. Mama claims that even a single touch by a manifestation of evil will permanently corrupt any member of the family.
From the beginning, viewers are meant to wonder if June is really the last bastion of hope fighting to save her children, or if she is suffering from mental illness and doing her best to instill her delusions in her children. Sam and Nolan disagree on this issue, which is a major part of the film’s conflict. Whatever the case, Berry told the audience after a screening of the new film at Fantastic Fest that Mama is “fucking crazy.”
“Whatever you think after watching the movie, raising two kids all by yourself in a house in the middle of the woods, you’ve gone crazy!” Berry said. “It drives you crazy, doesn’t it? It drives you damn crazy. So, at the end of the day, Why “She’s crazy, that’s not the question, you know? There’s no denying it. She’s crazy. She’s been made crazy for some reason, whether she was born that way or made that way. She’s fighting to keep everything under control.”
Image: Lionsgate Films/Everett Collection
Berry said it was the implied darkness that initially fascinated her about the film – a character so damaged by his experiences that it doesn’t matter whether those experiences are internal or external.
“I love when I can lose myself in a character and we forget who I am and I can get into the skin and the character of another person,” she said. “And it was really important, like Alex said when we first met – I talked about not losing the darkness of mom. I’ve played other mother roles and I was always the mother who fought for her children and she was very relatable. And to me, that was a different mother. I wanted to get into the complexity of being a mother.”
At one point in the film, it is made clear that Mama was abused as a child, while other elements suggest that there is a history of mental illness in her family and that her delusions may have been passed down from a previous generation. Still, Berry stressed, it is clear that Mama loves and is devoted to Sam and Nolan, even when that love harms them.
“Beyond all of its complexity and its darkness, I felt connected to the feeling of being a mother and bringing two children into the world,” Berry said. “What connected me to that mother and that world was a beautiful image that I could show: what it means to be a mother in every situation. And that’s why when I read the script and heard that Alex was going to direct it, I thought, ‘Yes, I’m in.'”
Never let go is now in theaters.
