Here are some extracts from the Internet Movie Database about the film. directed by Mark Romanek, from a screenplay by Alex Garland (warning: contains spoilers!)
As children, Ruth, Kathy and Tommy, spend their childhood at a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. As they grow into young adults, they find that they have to come to terms with the strength of the love they feel for each other, while preparing themselves for the haunting reality that awaits them.
The film begins with onscreen captions explaining that a medical breakthrough in 1952 has permitted the human lifespan to be extended beyond 100 years. Subsequently, the film is narrated by 28-year-old Kathy H. as she reminisces about her childhood at Hailsham, as well as her adult life after leaving the school.
The first section of the film depicts the young Kathy, along with her friends Tommy and Ruth, spending their childhood at Hailsham, a seemingly idyllic English boarding school. Gradually, it is revealed that the children are imprisoned on the school grounds and that the film is set in an alternate twentieth century different from our own. At one point, one of the teachers is fired after telling the pupils of their fate: they are destined to provide donor organs for transplants, and will die before they can fulfill their potential. Tommy is emotionally fragile, and Kathy falls in love with him, but Ruth then steals him from her.
In the second section of the film, the three friends, now teenagers, are rehoused in cottages on a rural farm. They are permitted to leave the grounds if they wish, but are resigned to their eventual fate, apparently seeing it as inevitable. At the farm, they meet former pupils of similar schools to theirs. It is revealed that Kathy and the others are all clones, and are fascinated by the idea of finding the original people that they were "modelled on". From the others at the cottages, Kathy and her friends hear rumours of the possibility of "deferral" - a temporary reprieve from organ donation for clones who are in love and can prove it. Tommy becomes convinced that the art gallery at Hailsham was intended to identify clones who have a soul. The relationship between Tommy and Ruth becomes sexual, and jealousy causes Kathy and Ruth to break their friendship. The lonely Kathy applies to become a "carer" - a clone who is given a temporary reprieve from donation as a reward for supporting and comforting donors as they are made to give up their organs. She has become a carer by the time she hears that Tommy and Ruth have split up.
In the third and final section of the film, Kathy is working as a carer some years later. She has watched many clones gradually die as their organs are donated; their deaths are referred to as "completion". She meets Ruth, who is frail after two donations. They find Tommy, who is also weakened by his donations, and drive to the sea. There, Ruth admits that she did not love Tommy, and only seduced him because she was afraid to be alone. She is consumed with guilt, and has been searching for a way to help Tommy and Kathy. She believes that the rumours of "deferral" for couples are true, and has found the address of their old French teacher from Hailsham, whom she thinks may help. Ruth dies on the operating table shortly afterward. Tommy explains to Kathy that he has been creating art in the hope that it will aid deferral. He and Kathy drive to visit the French teacher, who, it transpires, lives with the headmistress of Hailsham. The two teachers tell them that there is no such thing as deferral, and that Tommy's artworks will not help him.
The film ends with Tommy dying on the operating table, and Kathy left alone, knowing that her donations will begin in two weeks. Contemplating the ruins of her childhood, she asks in voice-over whether her fate is really any different from the people who will receive her organs: after all, "we all complete".
We go to see the film at Phoenix Square this evening. I'm beyond that cliché now, that the film is never as good as the book, let's just take that as given from now on. It's not a long book, but neither is it a long film. It could easily have been 20 or 30 minutes longer, without feeling like it had gone on too long. In the book, there's much more about life in the school, but of course, there's no on-screen time for the bankable, box office stars in that part of the story. Subtle as the film is in many ways, still it takes things that are only hinted at in the book and has to hold them in front of the viewer's face. But Carey Mulligan is the most wonderful actor, Keira Knightley draws on some darker and uglier threads than we're used to seeing her do and Andrew Garfield wins our sympathy as a boy who never grows up (he's the new Spider-Man. Either he's got some very different tools in his box or we're going to be presented with a very diffident, introverted interpretation of the webslinger).
I found Never Let Me Go more bleak and downbeat than The Road (which I also listened to on audio book and saw on film at the Phoenix). The kind of society depicted in Never Let Me Go seems only a shade darker than our own, but one from which compassion and humanity has bled out.
The book itself is a perfect example of a first-person narrative, in that we never see or know anything that is not seen or known by our narrator, Kathy H. The film adaptation doesn't stick to this; some important incidents that happen "off stage" in the book (such as Ruth completing) are presented overtly to us. This moment in particular provides one of the most chilling sequences in the film as we see the equipment in the operating theatre being switched off - Ruth being just part of the machinery. In Kathy's worldview (which seems to be held in common with the other children as they grow up), there's simply no possibility of escape, of hiding, of fighting back, of pretending to be someone else, of rising up in revolt. She, Tommy, Ruth and all the other clones whom she knows (and we encounter) at school, at the cottages or in the recovery centres, have their cramped lives charted out for them. The only chance of any deviation is to bargain for a little more time, which can only be granted, like a stay of execution, by those above them. The thought never even enters Kathy's head that they can do anything else. Tommy's angry outburst are the only kind of resistance that we see - and he's considered a freak for doing even that.
The story foregrounds many moral, religious and spiritual issues: free will versus predestination, the value of individual lives, the relative importance of the personal and the social good, and more. It's a beautiful story, if also sad beyond words.
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