I guessed Never Let Go’s big twist one month ago, and it still worked brilliantly

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Never Let Go (2024)

While Never let go Relying heavily on its big twist, I guessed where the horror movie’s story was heading a month before I even saw it. Horror movie trailers are a mixed blessing. Some, like NEON’s viral marketing campaign for Long legsCan be as disturbing and thrilling as a great horror movie. Others, like the trailers for Alien: Romulus, Speak no evilAnd many more of 2024’s biggest genre movies give away too much plot and leave viewers with no reason to seek out the movie itself. Then there are movies like director Alexandre Aja Never let go.

While the end of Never let go Surprisingly, the basic premise of the movie is quite familiar. In a setup that has a lot in common with previous hits like A quiet place, Azrael, ArcadianAnd Bird BoxHalle Berry stars as an unnamed mother who protects her two sons from a creation-shifting evil entity that lurks in the woods outside their isolated woodland home. An unspecified off-screen event seems to have devastated the world’s population, leaving only occasional monsters that threaten the family if they stray too far from the house. Never let gos trailer offered only that premise, but that was enough.

Never Let Go’s trailer and director gave away his big twist

The survival horror turns out not to be post-apocalyptic

When I saw who directed the movie and saw its trailer, I guessed correctly Never let goIt’s three without even seeing the movie itself. I can also prove it, since I wrote an article for this very site where I predicted that Halle Berry’s character would be revealed to be delusional, the off-screen apocalypse would be revealed to be imaginary, and the twist would be that her sons They were living in the normal world all along. to some extent, Never let go‘s twist copied Aja’s earlier slasher, hat tensionWith both movies starring unstable, unreliable heroines.

hat tension Was a direct slash in which the apparent final girl was the killer unbeknownst to herself, while Never let goThe twist is a bit more complicated. Barry’s stern, strict mother insists that “The evil“Inhabits the forest surrounding the family home, but her sons cannot see or hear this”EvilThe evil is only visible to their mother and since it takes the form of her abusive mother and her ex-husband, it becomes clear pretty quickly that it may be a projection. From there, it is not difficult to guess the world never really ended.

Never let go the big second twist saves his story

The main death of the movie is difficult to predict

innovation, Never let go Still managed to shock me Although I saw the twist of the movie coming weeks before it even arrived in theaters. While I knew from the opening scene that the world hadn’t ended, and it was just the central family living a hard-scrabble existence in a remote cabin, I didn’t see the movie’s big second twist coming at all. . Good before Never let go Riffs on M Night Shyamalan’s The Village In its ending, the second act of the movie ends with the brutal, completely unexpected death of Barry’s character.

Barry’s unnamed mother taking her own life really shocked me when I thought I had all the movie’s tricks figured out, and this twist made the movie’s ending much stronger than I expected. While the perspective of Barry’s character dominated the first half of the movie, the finale instead shifted its focus between her two children. When one overcame the connection to the supernatural evil that he inherited from his mother, the other was overcome by the Hereditary curse. The unexpected retelling of Cain and Abel surprised me legitimately, because I did not think that Barry’s character could die before the end.

Never Let Go’s predictable twist may have hurt its box office

The $20 million movie grossed only $8 million

Although Never let goThe clever Polaroid scene proves that there was some sort of supernatural business in the woods, the movie still eventually has to admit that its apparent apocalypse was a fabrication. It left some critics unimpressed, with the horror earning mixed reviews upon release. Meanwhile, Never let goIts box office performance was less than idealWhich didn’t shock me because of its predictable twist. Never let goIts under-performance has to come down, at least in part, to the fact that a viewer can correctly guess its ending from the trailer.

Never let go is disturbing and effective, but the main twist of the movie is unfortunately too obvious. Never let go‘s clever, creepy psychological horror story might have been better if its promotional materials hadn’t kept its big reveal a secret, but, as it is, it’s not surprising that Aja’s movie underperformed. Never let go Made $8.4 million on a $20 million budget, proving that a predictable twist can be a major problem for horror movies upon release, even when they’re otherwise strong genre outings.

Source: Term