(spoilers ahead)

Movie adaptations of novels are an impossible task, at least for anyone who has read the book. It’s almost given that they are worse than the book, you always have this nagging feeling of “there’s so much missing” and it is just hard to judge the movie on its own (unless it's The Lovely Bones that I watched recently too and that turned one of my favorite books into a total mess). Never Let Me Go is a novel that very much lives by its unreliable narration (as I discussed yesterday) which is a hard thing to translate into a movie. Although the movie opens with a voice-over, it doesn’t keep it until the very end, taking the opening and closing sentences of the novel almost word for word. Altogether the movie succeeds as a movie even if it deviates from the novel in many major aspects and, as expected, leaves out large chunks of the story. Nevertheless, it is a successful movie, well-directed by Mark Romanek and almost perfectly cast with Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley (getting the rare “and-role” despite being one of the major characters).