Evil lurks in the woods outside Sam and Nolan’s house.
It wants them. It wants to corrupt them and destroy the love they share for each other and for their mother. And all it needs to possess one of them and ruin everything is one touch.
At least, that’s what Momma told them.
According to her, the Evil had already destroyed the rest of the world when it came for their family. Her father had built their house for her mother to raise a family in—to protect them all. And as long as they remain connected to the house and the love that it represents, the Evil can’t touch them.
So whenever Momma, Sam and Nolan need to step foot off the front porch, they tie thick ropes around their waists, a sort of tether linking them to the protection of the house.
But lately, they’ve been needing to do that a lot more.
The family has suffered hard winters before. However, the last one was particularly harsh. The animals still haven’t returned to the forest. Vegetables grown in the shed next to their house aren’t sprouting again. And the water situation is looking pretty bleak, too.
Momma is insistent that they can’t leave the woods to find food. There just isn’t enough rope to keep them attached. And there’s no way any of them can risk letting go. In fact, that’s pretty much the only rule: Never let go.
But while scavenging the woods for food, Nolan gets angry at his brother. He steps on Sam’s rope, causing the boy to come untethered, fall and break his leg. Nolan didn’t mean to hurt Sam, so he unties his own rope to save him.
And then … nothing happens.
Nolan and Sam go untouched by the Evil they’ve been taught to fear their whole lives. Soon, Nolan begins to wonder: Does the Evil exist at all?
Momma, Sam and Nolan love each other. In fact, it’s their love that has kept the Evil at bay for so long. Momma acts sacrificially to save her sons. And Nolan tries desperately to save his brother from starvation. Nolan also gives some of his food to the family dog even though he’s starving.
The Evil in this story goes unnamed. And although it’s questionable at times whether Momma and her sons are seeing something genuinely evil or just hallucinating, it ultimately becomes clear that the enemy they face is a very real, corporeal force.
Momma and the boys repeat a sort of prayer to the house, calling it “heaven” and asking it to protect their family. Momma uses this prayer as part of a cleansing ritual for her sons after they’re temporarily caught untethered outside the house. The family considers the house sacred, and there are other ritualistic occurrences.
The wicked being in the story is a shapeshifter. It often appears as people whom Momma has lost throughout the years, albeit with a serpent-like tongue. One form looks as though it was made from the body parts of half a dozen victims, and this iteration uses its many arms to scale a tree.
It also appears as a snake. Although it’s not stated outright, there seems to be a spiritual link to events in Genesis. The Evil tries to convince Nolan and Sam that it doesn’t exist and that nothing bad will happen if they let go, just as Satan convinced Adam and Eve that eating the forbidden fruit wouldn’t kill them.
Momma confesses that the Evil possessed her once before. That’s how it found their house in the woods. And she has a tattoo of a snake (one of the being’s many forms) on her back. She says her mother somehow knew the Evil was coming for them even before it took over the world. And when Momma’s actions become desperate, Nolan calls her out, saying that her actions are just as bad as the thing she fears.
[Spoiler warning] Sam eventually gets possessed, too. And he commits several evil acts under the being’s command. But then the Evil speaks to Nolan, commenting on how it was able to manipulate the family even before it touched Sam. Nolan refuses to believe Sam can’t be saved, fighting back using Momma’s cleansing ritual. It appears to work, forcing the Evil to peel back its skin to reveal a mottled, faceless being before burning away. But later, we see that Sam is still possessed by the Evil and lives on.
We see Momma’s exposed back and shoulders as she bathes in a tub.
Momma explains to Sam and Nolan that the Evil possessed both of her parents and the boys’ father. It made them violent and uncontrollable, so Momma felt that she had to kill them. The Evil now appears to Momma as each of their corpses, trying to make her feel guilty enough to untether herself from the house. One of them clearly has a stab wound in his back. Another has black goo dripping from her mouth and accuses Momma of poisoning her.
Momma tells her sons that the Evil once appeared as an injured little girl, just outside the rope line, screaming for help. Momma refused to untie her rope to help, so the girl eventually died and rotted away. We see this girl at various stages of decay throughout the film.
Sam, who’s convinced that the Evil has taken on the form of a hiker, shoots the man in the back with his mother’s crossbow. The man runs off, eventually succumbing to his wounds. We never learn if he was real, but it’s disturbing how easily Sam shoots the man, especially since he had agreed to leave the boys alone.
After hearing Sam say that Momma loves him more than Nolan (possibly a trick of the Evil), Nolan steps on Sam’s rope, causing his brother to fall and break his leg. Throughout the rest of the film, the brothers have a sort of rivalry regarding their mother, one that occasionally results in fistfights.
Momma holds each of the boys at knifepoint, ordering them to repeat a ritualistic prayer to their house after they accidentally become untethered from it. Later, the brothers wonder if she would have killed them if they’d been unable to say the prayer, with the inability to do so implying possession. In another incident, Momma locks Nolan inside a cellar-like space for fear that he’s been taken over by the Evil. He hasn’t, and he wets himself in fear while begging his mother to release him.
Nolan and Momma each have violent nightmares. In Nolan’s dream, he’s dragged by his rope into a well containing a monster. In Momma’s, her mouth is covered with blood from eating her own children (a threat the Evil promises her will come true).
Sam uses a slingshot to knock a squirrel out of a tree. He then stomps on the creature’s neck to kill it. And Momma skins it later. In a desperate moment, Momma resolves to shoot the family dog for food, but the animal escapes.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the rest of this section] The Evil has told Momma that if it gets hold of her, it will make her eat her babies. And when it eventually manages to corner her, rather than let it force her to attack her children, Momma takes a piece of broken glass and slices open her own throat. Sam tries helplessly to revive her.
When Sam then becomes possessed, he tries to kill his twin with a machete before locking Nolan inside the house and setting the whole thing on fire. And Sam seems to enjoy this, smiling and taking a picture of himself with the burning building in the background.
One use of the f-word and one misuse of God’s name.
None.
One of the boys becomes ill and nearly dies from starvation. Sam eats a frog when he’s desperate for food. The whole family eats tree bark when they’re unable to find any other edible vegetation or meat.
Nolan is often disobedient. More than once, he is tempted to untie his rope, only to be stopped by his mother or brother’s arrival. He’s also supposed to wear a bell on his ankle at night because he sleepwalks. He puts himself in danger a couple of times when he neglects to do this.
Sam can be quite selfish, frequently eating more than his fair share of food even though they’re all starving.
Momma lies to her sons about the outside world. And this creates quite a bit of discord in the family.
Never Let Go likes to keep audiences guessing. Is the Evil real? Or is it a product of Momma’s fear?
Nolan suspects the latter, which is what gives this story its plot. But the film acts as a sort of exploration of that juxtaposition between fear and evil. Can fear cause us to commit horrific acts? What would we be willing to sacrifice to protect our loved ones? How do we discern the difference between fear of evil and evil itself?
Never Let Go tries to tell us that if we have love, we can conquer fear and evil. But in the end, the latter prevails. So that message is bunk—unless, of course, the film’s creators were trying to set up a sequel. (Insert eye roll).
Violent imagery pervades the entire film. Children commit murder. And a mother takes her own life in a brutal attempt to save her kids from herself (and the Evil trying to possess her).
Add in a bit of foul language, some very serious spiritual links—it seems that the Evil represents Satan—as well as multiple unanswered questions, and the entire plot just sort of falls apart.
If the creators of Never Let Go wanted a supernatural horror flick that makes people think about fear and evil, well, they certainly succeeded. But if they were trying to tell us a story about a family that would do anything to save the ones they love … well, maybe they shouldn’t have made that family pray to a house.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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