Never Let Me Go isn’t Logan’s Run. It’s not a full on sci-fi film. With its concept, you’d imagine its setting being futuristic and dystopian. Instead, director Mark Romanek has made an alternate universe period piece. The film feels timeless, as if the universe got stuck in the 1950′s. There’s nothing overtly sci-fi about it. After all, it’s a love story first and foremost. Being the character piece that it is, it never really focuses on the ethics of cloning; a word not once mentioned in the film. No character gives a rousing speech about how wrong this concept is and that they need to, “Fight back!” Romanek doesn’t think the film argues the ethical side of cloning, because it’s unquestionably wrong and that it doesn’t need to be argued in the first place. And while I could have asked Romanek a thousand questions about his excellent return to the big screen, we mainly covered the two topics discussed above as well as the film’s commentary on art and the style of the film. Here’s what Mark Romanek had to say.

Never Let Me Go is many things. It’s a tale of young love; it’s a dystopian sci-fi nightmare; it’s an existentialist drama, and it’s a disturbing social commentary that looks deeply into the notion of what it means to be human.

Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go continues to prove that it’s a contender for Awards Season. The trailer showed exactly how calm and desperate the entire thing might be, and Romanek’s history points to the movie being soul-crushingly depressing. Fortunately, that depression comes with a British accent, so it’s not quite so hard to take. Scratch that. Any sentiment of sweetness is blown out of the water by this clip featuring Kiera Knightley, a not-at-all-veiled threat against Carey Mulligan’s character, and what looks like the creepiest time possible to kiss another girl on the lips. Check it out after the jump.

At first glance, with its sweeping score and broody listing of talented young actors, the first trailer for Mark Romanek’s upcoming drama Never Let Me Go looks targeted for a run at awards season. But as anyone who has read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel upon which the film is based knows, there’s a lot more here than what you can see at first glance. The fact that it start Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield and is in the sure hands of Romanek only makes it that much more interesting.

The actress has been cast in an adaptation of Kazua Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let Me Go,” which begins filming next month in Jolly Old Dystopian England.