This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. We’ll be rolling out more reports throughout the festival.
Gothic horror film by Alexandre Aja Never let go is all about cleverly playing games with the audience’s expectations. Halle Berry stars as a harried woman (credited simply as “Mama”) who raises two young twins, Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV), in a rural cabin she sees as the family’s only defense against “evil.” In her story, the shape-shifting, omnipresent Evil has possessed everyone in the world except her and her sons, and they must perform rituals to keep it at bay, including remaining tied to the house’s foundation with heavy rope if they set foot outside the walls. Mama claims that even a single touch from a manifestation of evil will permanently corrupt each of the family members.
From the beginning of the film, viewers are left wondering whether June is truly the last bastion of hope, fighting to save her children, or whether she is suffering from a mental illness, doing her best to instill her delusions in her children. Sam and Nolan disagree on the issue, which creates a major conflict in the film. Either way, 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 you’ve seen the movie, raising two kids in a house in the middle of the woods, all by yourself, you’re crazy!” Berry said. “That’s crazy, right? That’s fucking crazy. 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 made crazy for some reason, whether she’s born that way or made that way. She’s struggling to keep it all together.”
Berry said the implied darkness — a character so damaged by experiences that it doesn’t matter whether those experiences are internal or external — initially drew her to the film.
“I love when I can lose myself in a character, and we can forget who I am, and I can take on this skin and the persona 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 fought for her children, and she was very relatable. And for me, this was a different mother. I wanted to focus on the complexity of a mother.”
At one point in the film, viewers are given 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 is delusional, it is a delusion possibly passed down from a previous generation. Still, Berry emphasized, it is clear that Mama loves and is devoted to Sam and Nolan, even when that love damages them.
“Her complexity and darkness aside, I felt connected to the feeling of being a parent, of giving birth to two children,” Berry said. “What connected me to this mother and this world was a beautiful tapestry to display, what it is to be a mother in any circumstance. And that’s why when I read the script and heard that Alex was directing, I was like, ‘Yeah, sign me up.'”
Never let go is now playing in theaters.