"French director Alexandre Aja has been known as a member of the horror helming fraternity called the “Splat Pack,” named for the extreme violence in their films. Certainly, many of his pictures, from the 2003 breakthrough Haute Tension and the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, to his exceptional, and most successful film to date, 2019’s Crawl — in which a family is trapped in the crawl space of their home as alligators surround them during a Category 5 hurricane in Florida (a personal favorite of Quentin Tarantino) — have proved his chops as a genre filmmaker. Now, he steps up to another level with a less gory and more psychological thriller style of film, Never Let Go, in which Halle Berry stars as a mother of twin boys who is traumatically haunted by her own lifelong demons, which she passes on to them in their remote house deep in the woods…

… At every turn Aja keeps us on the edge of our seats with an exceptional skill to create bone-chilling scares out of almost nothing. The emphasis here is not on piling up the bodies or following the usual tropes of the horror genre, or his own bloody cinematic past, but rather keeping it for the most part (yes, there are a couple of gross-outs) in the psychological realm. Fear is a very strong weapon. Clearly, Momma has issues and it is driving her family apart and diminishing the control she wields.

Both Daggs and Jenkins are outstanding in their film debuts, as natural as kid actors can get, and they really have to carry this film throughout.

Cinematography by Maxime Alexandre and editing by Elliot Greenberg really add to the lush remote look of this film set in the middle of nowhere. It all grabs you by the throat — the best horror film I have seen this year…"