10 Dystopian Sci-Fi Films Where The State Wins

Remembered more as something of a weepy drama than a full-on dystopian fiction, Mark Romanek's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is nonetheless as speculatively punishing as they come when you boil it down to basics.

Set in England’s south-east and featuring an alternative history in which breakthroughs in genetic research have extended the lifespan of the average human far beyond 100 years, the film centres on Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield), a trio of childhood friends in love, who share a mysterious past at Hailsham boarding school. As it turns out, the three of them are clones of other people, bred solely for the purpose of providing their all-natural human counterparts with living, breathing banks of spare organs.

While the state doesn't play an immediately oppressive role in Never Let Me Go, everything these creative, loving and undeniably sentient clones go through is sanctioned from the top down, their lives considered nothing more than instrumentally useful. Thus, by film's end, Ruth and Tommy are dead, having fulfilled their bleak life's purpose, with Kathy just beginning her suffering. And none of the deep humanity they have shown, either in school - which was set up to convince the authorities of just this - or as adults, has swayed government policy.