‘Never Let Me Go’: Sequestered from society

The kids are not all right. And that’s what makes “Never Let Me Go” so memorable.

Set in an alternative Britain, the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 dystopian love story follows Kathy, Ruth and Tommy from naive youngsters at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school, to the institutionalized, emotionally immature twentysomethings they’ve become — as played by Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield. Close friends, they’ve grown up knowing they are somehow different and now live apart from the outside world, marking time until they are called upon to fulfill their destinies.

As actors, the cast had to decide how to play people who had been so separated from the rest of society their entire lives. “Do you play something that’s slightly not human? Do you make them more mannered?” says Knightley in a phone interview after shooting. “But we wanted them to be a mirror to humanity. So it became incredibly important that although they’re innocents, they are entirely human.”

But they are humans, it turns out, whose entire lives are concertinaed into a few short years, yet who confront their own mortality with honor and responsibility. “Kazuo’s books and this book especially, it sneaks up on you,” muses Garfield, who on a spring day last year had just spent an hour filming in a muddy field for a brief but pivotal sequence toward the end of Act 2. “It’s quiet and it stabs you in the heart and you don’t notice until you look down and the pain starts to flood through you.”

“That’s a great metaphor but I hope the film is more cathartic, as opposed to lethal,” says director Mark Romanek, who listened to the audio version of Ishiguro’s book on his way to set every morning. Renowned for his elegant and evocative music videos, Romanek says he’s attempting to create a visual and tonal analogue to Ishiguro’s precise prose. “The intention was to do something simple with an almost kind of Zen mentality and a British reserve.” But once he saw Mulligan’s performance, that aesthetic evolved. “It inspired me to be even more rigorous,” he says, “because she was exhibiting an elegant, minimalist style that had so much bubbling under the surface.”

Mulligan, it transpires, is another huge fan of the novel and was careful of its transformation to the screen. “It was definitely something we had to protect and we were all quite fierce about that.”

Opening: Sept. 15

—Mark Salisbury