Butler's Cinema Scene

Lewis MacDougall

“A MONSTER CALLS” My rating: B- 

108 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The makers of “A Monster Calls” work so hard to avoid anything resembling sentimental manipulation that the film runs the risk of being emotionally bland.

Blending psychological insight, fantastic images and the most painful of human conditions, this Spanish/U.K. production is nothing if not ambitious.

In describing how a 12-year-old British boy copes with the looming death of his single mother, this film from Spanish director J.A. Bayona wades into some serious territory. But despite a late-breaking emotional crescendo that will have all but the coolest viewers reaching for a hankie, I found much of the film to be curiously detached.

Conor (Lewis McDougall) — described early on as “too old to be a kid, too young to be a man” — has some of the usual adolescent problems, including a trio of schoolyard thugs who revel in beating him up every day.

Things are no better at home where his loving Mum (Felicity Jones) is sinking into chemo-misery while his brittle granny (Sigourney Weaver, attempting but not really mastering an English accent) exudes about as much warmth and sympathy as a prickly pear.

Small wonder that Conor finds refuge in his own imagination. “You’re always off in your own little dream world,” observes one of his classroom tormentors. “What’s there that’s so interesting?”

A lot actually. Every night Conor is visited by a monster, a giant tree creature that uproots itself from a hilltop churchyard and comes stomping to his bedroom window.

Lewis McDougall, Felicity Jones

This intimidating figure — all twisted wood and smoldering embers — announces that he’ll be telling Conor some stories. And then, in the voice of Liam Neeson, he proceeds to do so.

To say that the monster’s tales are ambiguous is an understatement.  They lack good guys and bad guys, and characters are rarely what at first glimpse they seem. Villains have virtues, heroes have flaws.

These segments have been rendered through spectacular animation — they’re like watercolors come to life.

But their meaning? Well, that eludes Conor, and those of us in the audience — at least until a last-act revelation.

Bayona and Patrick Ness (adapting his novel for the screen) seem to take as their model Guillermo Del Toro, that Mexican master of the modern Gothic. But as is often the case with Del Toro, they get so wrapped up in fantastic imagery that they lose sight of the story’s emotional undercurrents.

At least there can be no complaint about the performances of young McDougall — whose  hollow-eyed countenance will haunt viewers long after the film’s over — and Jones, whose dying mother is almost too authentic to be borne.

| Robert W. Butler