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Halle Berry plays a mother with twin sons battling an evil spirit closing in on their wilderness home after a world-ending event in the trailer for Lionsgate‘s Never Let Go, which dropped on Thursday.
Director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Crawl) in the horror-thriller has their remote house in the woods fitted with a long ropes to enable mother and sons to remain connected at all times as unseen dangers approach.
“The evil out there is clever. One touch without a rope is all it takes,” Berry’s character tells her sons at one point in the trailer, as they commit to keep tethered to the ropes for safety and connection. But as demonic forces engulf their off-the-grid house, one of the twins questions whether evil exists.
And that breaks the family bond and triggers an all-out battle for survival. “That rope is your lifeline. Never let go. Say it,” a terror-stricken Berry, brandishing a long knife, at one point warns her sons.
Earlier, Berry touted Never Let Go at CinemaCon.
Berry said she took the role because she’s a “bona fide adrenaline junkie” who has always loved these kinds of movies. “These boys have never left the house that they were born in for 10 years,” Berry continued. “Right away, it was a creepy environment. I was challenged to bring reality to what that would be like. What does mothering look like in a house in the woods with no one around?”
For the part, she learned survival skills and said there was “a little bit of Method acting” going on. “There was no electricity, no lights, my character skinning squirrels, and they’re eating bugs and frogs — raw frogs — in the woods,” Berry said,. “I had to really skin a squirrel. These things wildly challenged me to create some reality within this world that felt so foreign.”
And she said she pulled from her own life as a mother of two to inform her performance: “Since I became a mother 16 years ago, playing these kinds of roles has wildly excited me. With this movie, it reminded me how I would protect my children with my life. We often say, ‘I would take a bullet for my kids.’ Would you take a knife for your kids?”
Anthony B. Jenkins, Percy Daggs, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Christin Park and Stephanie Lavigne also star.
Never Let Go, from the producers of Stranger Things and Arrival, is set for a theatrical release on Sept. 27. Lionsgate is releasing the horror thriller, in association with Media Capital Technologies.
Aja directed the horror pic from a script by Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby. He also produced alongside Dan Cohen, Dan Levine and Shawn Levy, with Berry, Dan Clarke, Connor DiGregorio, Holly Jeter, Emily Morris and Christopher Woodrow serving as executive producers.