Review: A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls (12A)

USA 2016  108 mins  Dir: J.A. Bayona  Cast: Lewis MacDougall, Liam Neeson, Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Geraldine Chaplin, Toby Kebbell

Runty 12-year-old Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall) is having a hard time. He’s got a cancer mum (Jones), an absent dad (Kebbell), a stern and forbidding granny (Weaver) and he’s bullied at school. Little wonder the poor lad retreats into fantasy. This is sparked when he and ailing mum sit down together to watch King Kong unspooling on her late father’s vintage projector. Whoa! – a pristine 16mm sound print of the 1933 classic. They could stick it on eBay and enjoy a luxury holiday on the proceeds. But I digress. “People don’t like what they can’t understand,” mum remarks of Kong’s fate, giving ample warning that this is a film for those who prefer their messages underlined in triplicate.

Before long, our glum pint-sized hero is hearing ominous noises outside his bedroom window. Then the bloody great fiery-eyed yew tree at the bottom of the garden uproots itself and lumbers over to make an offer Conor can’t refuse. In the familiar booming tones of Liam Neeson, this arboreal interloper explains that he will tell three stories, after which the nipper is expected to reciprocate with his own nightmare.

Adapted by Patrick Ness from his own award-winning novel – which was in turn based on a premise by Siobhan Dowd, who died of breast cancer before she had time to complete it – A Monster Calls is the second English-language film by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona, who made a creditable foray into Hollywood with tsunami flick The Impossible. Bayona was mentored by Guillermo del Toro for his superior debut The Orphanage, to which this bears certain superficial similarities and boasts an obvious del Toro influence, but lacks its subtlety and restraint as the whole thing turns into a full-on, somewhat overwrought tearjerker, complete with mandatory mournful plinky-plonky piano accompaniment.

Fortunately, there’s still much to enjoy here. Chattier than Groot and much more fun than Treebeard, Neeson’s eponymous monster earns his place as one of the great movie trees. A superb motion capture CGI creation, he evinces menace (“I have come to get you Conor O’Malley!”) and solicitude in equal measure and proves much less wooden, if you’ll forgive the phrase, than many a flesh and blood character. Equally magnificent is the watercolour animation of the first fable, which will delight Studio Ghibli fans even as it disrupts the narrative flow.

The humans are mostly OK too. After Rogue One, Felicity Jones continues to make good on her early promise, which was stalled by a fair few duffers (Chalet Girl, anybody?), investing her few scenes with palpable emotion. Lewis MacDougall’s Conor is an agreeably non-annoying kid too, especially when he’s acting out. Alas, Sigourney Weaver sounds as though she’s working a little too hard on her English accent – and not always succeeding.

But as the big weepie climax approaches, cynics may find those supposedly profound life lessons dispensed by the gruff perambulating vegetable to be a tad on the banal side. Sure, the dishonest Hollywood happy ending is mercifully avoided, but the grand notion that life is messy and humans are complicated proves a little underwhelming, even when freighted with all the manipulative tools at the modern director’s disposal, as the blubbin’ tyke learns to ‘let go’ in an all-too-literal sense.