What would it be like to know the meaning of your life? To be told in your childhood the purpose of your existence? To know that you were conceived solely to fulfill that purpose? What would it be like? What would you be like?

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are raised at a boarding school named Hailsham, a manor set in the English countryside, where the students wear button-up shirts, blazers, and ties in varying shades of gray. The students tease one another, whisper secrets in the dark, and play make-believe. Empathetic Kathy and sweet but socially awkward Tommy develop a tentative romance. These are, it would seem, normal children. Their guardians tell them that they are special, that they must take care of themselves. This would not be so different from what most parents tell their children, except that most parents would say this with pride, and the Hailsham guardians do not.

When the children grow older, they leave Hailsham to join others like themselves in various complexes. Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Kiera Knightley), and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) are sent to the same complex, known as “The Cottages”. There they gain some exposure to the outside world. They are allowed for the first time to spend their days as they wish. They try watching television, but are bewildered by what they see.

I know that in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, the reader is left to discover what these children are slowly, that their fate is unsure until midway through the story. In director Mark Romanek’s interpretation, the viewer knows long before the halfway point, long before the children know. Watching this film, I was reminded of Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, which received a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film earlier this year. It is another film in which children are raised according to a value system completely foreign from our own. It is another film that reminds us that words have no intrinsic meaning; words are created, altered, and manipulated by humans to serve various purposes.

Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are “donors”. They have no parents in the traditional sense because they are clones. When they reach their mid-twenties, they will donate their organs, one by one, until they reach “completion”. Their value is determined by how many donations they can make. It would be embarrassing to complete after a single donation. Some of the donors, like Kathy, can train as “carers” before they make their first donation. Carers have the task of preparing and tending to donors before and after their operations. Kathy is a good carer—her patients are hardly ever agitated. They accept the brevity of their lives, and then serenely give those lives away.

The film has the

cold beauty of freshly fallen snow. Its color palette is formed of white, beige, grey, light green, light blue, light gold. The characters are mostly quiet in their sorrow, in their contemplation, in their love.

Watching this film, I wondered why they did not fight against their fates. Even Ruth, the most defiant of the bunch, walks calmly to her slaughter. But then again, I was raised believing in free will. I have never questioned it. If you knew your life’s purpose, and had never known any other, perhaps you, too, would unquestioningly give your heart, your lungs, and your kidneys to save another.

Never Let Me Go is exquisite in its simplicity. That the horror never hits home is less a flaw of the film, and more a reflection of the ease with which the human mind shies away from unnecessary discomfort. If only Romanek had cut the last few minutes of the film (unnecessary voiceover laying out the film’s message), and dialed back the overbearing soundtrack (mournful violin can be less effective than silence), this could have been a near-perfect film.

Extras on the DVD include actor commentary, on-set photography, artwork shown in the film, materials detailing the fictional national donor program, and trailers from upcoming films. None of these extras are particularly memorable, but the film has enough lasting power that you should own the DVD anyway.