Never Let Me Go is a haunting exploration of what humans can do to one another, how they can attempt to redefine the very concept of humanity in order to exploit those they see as subhuman. It tackles these themes as skillfully and memorably as any film of recent years, perhaps even more than most. It does this by taking an idea that’s usually relegated to loud, explosive action films and spinning it into a quiet, deeply powerful drama.

How strange, then, that the minds behind the film seem to be making every effort to distance themselves from their achievement. The revelation about half-an-hour in, that the film is about three young clones who were (to put it bluntly) created for spare parts, spreads a dark cloud over the story that nothing can dissipate. Yet screenwriter Alex Garland told Moviefone, “It’s not like a film covertly about stem-cell research or the evils of cloning, it’s got nothing to do with that, it’s about mortality and other people and love and death and it sounds trite saying it like that, but it’s sort of true as well.” Kazuo Ishiguro, author of the acclaimed novel on which the film was based, told TIME, “I don’t want people to come away from the film thinking, I wonder if we should continue experimenting with stem cells. That’s not the intent.” In the same article, director Mark Romanek stated, “It’s about the brevity of our time on the planet. And when we become aware of how briefly we’re here, how do we make the best use of our time? And how do we not come to the end of our life and regret our choices? That’s the film I was making. The science-fiction aspects are just a delivery system for those ideas.” Even one of the stars, Keira Knightley, caught herself short after calling the film a “quiet tragedy” in her TIME interview: “Gosh, I shouldn’t say ‘quiet tragedy.’ That doesn’t really sell it very well. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just the way life is.”