Preview: London Film Festival

Over the past few years, however, as the studios have become more adept - some might say calculating - in releasing their prestige films in the autumn and winter to keep them fresh in the minds of the voters for the various awards bodies, the festival has cannily exploited this gradual change to its advantage to boost its profile in the industry.

If September's Toronto Film Festival is now regarded within as the North American launchpad for the season's awards contenders, then London - under the stewardship of artistic director Sandra Hebron - has become its British counterpart, the first stop on the campaign trail for distributors and studios hoping to create good buzz in time for the Oscars and the Baftas.

The past few years alone have seen the likes of Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, The Wrestler, A Single Man and A Prophet make their UK debuts here, and the next two weeks will give the British public their first taste of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, Darren Aronofsky's The Black Swan, Peter Mullan's Neds and the Colin Firth-starring The King's Speech (already the most Oscar-hyped film of the year).

To this end, proceedings got off to a suitably classy start last night with the Opening Night Gala premiere of Never Let Me Go, a haunting adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed dystopian novel, set in a subtly altered version of postwar Britain.

I'll leave it to others to jump the gun and start proclaiming the film a dead cert for this and that, but I will say that in casting Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, director Mark Romanek has managed to capture lightning in a bottle: they're currently the best and most sought-after young British acting talent in the world.

Indeed, it's fitting that the film should have opened the LFF for exactly this reason: it's been a year since the festival showcased Mulligan's break-out performance in An Education, and three since Garfield made his debut here in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (Garfield was great, the film wasn't). Since then, Mulligan has joined Knightley on the A-List, and Garfield has swung to the top of the Hollywood food chain thanks to being cast as the new Spider-Man.

In Never Let Me Go, all three do exceptional work in a film that relies on nuance and suggestion to deliver its full, devastating effect.Essentially a science-fiction film, but not with the more obvious tropes, it revolves around Kathy (Mulligan), Tommy (Garfield) and Ruth (Knightley), three friends who meet as children in the 1970s in a strange boarding school called Hailsham. The school is a kind of hermetic environment in which teachers prepare their charges for their fates in the outside world while buffering them against the realities of it.

The reasons for this peculiar treatment are gradually revealed via horrifying euphemisms - things are referred to as "bumper crops", death is referred to as "completion" - and though the actual twist is easily guessable thanks to an opening title card that makes reference to the arrival in the 1950s of a society-altering medical breakthrough, the film's power comes from the way it reveals the exact nature of that breakthrough - and its consequences - from the nave perspective of its three protagonists.

As with any good dystopian fiction, Never Let Me Go can be read as a comment on contemporary concerns, specifically our preoccupations with death and our use of technology to combat it, but Romanek (working from a beautifully concise script by novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland) keeps this secondary to the human story at its centre.

His elegant, deceptively simple visual style provides a suitably calm exterior for the complex waves of emotions rippling away beneath the surface of the characters. The end result is beguiling, strange and desperately sad - in the best way possible. If the rest of the LFF is as good, it's going to be a memorable year.