A Monster Calls (2016)
A children’s tale…for adults?
Presentation:
This is a film seemingly marketed similarly as Harry Potter. The presentation suggests it is targeted toward teenagers, but the material is a very mature one about grief. As a result, there is a jarring mismatch between tone and target audience, which leaves you feeling awkward like an adult on a playground. Visually it feels dark and broody out of something like a Grim’s tale, which is likely the primary reason you’d be interested in this film. It does satisfy in that imaginatively desaturated dark fantasy from later Harry Potter installments, but the execution misses the mark.
Conclusion:
For a teenager, this could be a great film. It’s wild, relevantly metaphorical and wonderfully fantastical that the youth loves. But the tonal contradictions make it hard to swallow what ultimately feels like an indecisive film trying to hard to cast a wide net over as large of an audience as possible. It ends up feeling unsure of what it is, an analogy for some of the characters in the story. Are you a children’s tale or adult? You can appeal to both but you can’t be both at the same time, and this film confusingly opts to bounces back and forth between the two.
Recommendations
Here’s Johnny!