Halle Berry fights a metaphorical evil in Never Let Go trailer

Never Let Go—the upcoming film from Piranha 3D and The Hills Have Eyes director Alexandre Aja—explores a particularly salient childhood anxiety, as many of the best horror films do. Did your parents ever insist on a preventative ritual—anything from religious practices to daily Flinstones vitamins—that your young mind found a little fishy, but you were also afraid to stop because what if the world did come crashing down? That’s the exact situation faced by the two young protagonists of Never Let Go, although their problems are a whole lot bigger than a nascent vitamin-B deficiency.

The film follows a mother (Halle Berry) and her fraternal twin sons (Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV), who live in a post-apocalyptic America haunted by some sort of unknown evil. Their only protection—at least according to the mother—is their family’s bond, literalized in the form of thick ropes that physically connect each member of the trio to their home any time they have to venture further than its front step. That protection breaks, however, when one of the sons begins to question whether the evil is real and the world really ended in the first place.

(Fun note for all the Yellowjackets fans out there: visually and tonally, it’s pretty hard to remember that this isn’t actually a prequel about dead cabin guy. It’s also not a new adaptation of Never Let Me Go, which may have been this author’s initial confused assumption.)

Even though this could be a down-the-middle monster flick (in interviews, the team has been expectedly cagey about the nature of the evil), there’s a pretty clear metaphor at play as well. “There’s a theme of the movie—it’s about generational trauma,” Berry told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s one of the things that attracted [Aja] to this film as well as me.”

With that in mind, it seems like this could only end one of two ways: either the world is evil, or the mother is evil. We’ll find out when the film premieres in theaters September 27.