Or they may exist in a realm of their own, and perhaps the Monster is indeed real, not an dreamed-up product of Conor’s misery. They may spring from the mind of Conor, an imaginative boy who loves to draw, a talent passed on to him by his mom. Bayona ( The Impossible) renders the Monster’s stories as gorgeously animated minimovies, ominous ink and watercolor drawings come to life. They will be dark fables, wretched and unexpected yet exquisitely perfect little nuggets of the human experience as untidy and unfair.ĭirector J.A. And the Monster promises to return three more times to tell Conor stories that, it will transpire, will have some bearing on Conor’s situation, and not only because they will mirror Conor’s own tale. The Monster (the voice of Liam Neeson: The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Ted 2) is quite menacing, in fact, more akin to Marley’s ghost than a kindly Ent. And then, one night, at precisely 12:07am, the ancient and slightly creepy yew tree in the churchyard Conor can see from his bedroom window uproots itself and saunters over to talk to him, not at all pleasantly. On top of all that, he’s also regularly bullied at school. Those visits may literally be nightmares for 12-year-old Conor (Lewis MacDougall: Pan), his way of processing the awful stuff he is coping with: the lingering wasting-away-by-cancer of his mother (Felicity Jones: Rogue One, Inferno) the absence of his father (Toby Kebbell: Ben-Hur, Warcraft), who flew away from England to live in Los Angeles after Conor’s parents’ divorce the impending implementation of the plan for Conor to move into the unfriendly home of his icy grandmother (Sigourney Weaver: Ghostbusters, Chappie). The Monster who calls is Death, and his visits are nightmares. This is a fantasy overtly about fantasy as the place where we can examine the things too terrifying to face in the real world. This is a film about fear and rage and abandonment and shame and grief, about how love can be painful, about the terror of learning that we exist at the mercy of time and fate. (It might be what The BFG could have been.) Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but more of the Grimm (and grim) sort: no happy ending, no heroes or villains, just a lot of hard truths about life and human nature. And then they will freak out when they discover how dark and angry and bitter and oh-so un-fairy-tale it is, how it gave the little ones scary dreams and why didn’t someone tell them? And a movie that is important and beautiful and heartbreaking will be unfairly maligned. This is my big worry re A Monster Calls: people who don’t read reviews will hear only that this is a fantasy movie based on a young-adult novel and presume that it is a kiddie movie.
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