A celebrated novelist wrote a book everyone agreed was chilling science fiction. He kept gently correcting his readers. It is not science fiction, he said. It is about you.

His novel imagined an England where certain children are raised in boarding schools for one purpose: to grow up and give away their organs, one by one, until they die young. Most took ithe story as a warning about biotechnology.

NEVER LET ME GO (2010) is the film of the book. The novelist was Kazuo Ishiguro, who would later win the Nobel Prize. The screenplay was by his friend Alex Garland, years before he made Ex Machina and Civil War.

Mark Romanek, who made Johnny Cash's "Hurt" video, directed it. Its cast, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley, has only grown more famous in the years since.

Viewers and readers ask why the characters don't just run away. Ishiguro's answer: Every one of us is handed a life that ends sooner than we would choose, and we spend it loving people and hoping for a little more time rather than raging at the walls.

It is one of the saddest films ever made about how precious an ordinary life is.