A Monster Calls (2017)

A Monster Calls (2017)

IMDB Movie Rating 7.7/10

A boy seeks the help of a tree monster to cope with his single mom's terminal illness.

Director: J.A. Bayona

Writers: Patrick Ness (screenplay), Patrick Ness (based upon the novel )

Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Felicity Jones, Lewis MacDougall |

PG-13 | 1h 48min | Drama, Fantasy

IMDB link Here

‘A Monster Calls,’ Offering a Boy a Lifeline  

The formidable creature looming over “A Monster Calls” is one of the more unnerving, impressive special-effects creations of the year. Whether it and the movie in general are too intense for younger children is something parents need to ask themselves. A PG-13 rating is sometimes an overreaction to a curse word or two, but here it’s a useful caution.

The story (by Patrick Ness, from an idea by Siobhan Dowd) seems to be trying to check every box on the Things That Might Trouble a Child list, when really “dying parent” is quite enough.

To “overstuffed” you could also add “overblown.” Yes, children can have vivid imaginations, but Conor’s visions seem almost too big for his preteen head, an inner kiddie landscape as dreamed up by a special-effects studio.

That said, the film, directed by J. A. Bayona, certainly dares to be darker and more substantial than the average family movie. The monster, who Conor soon realizes is there to help, not harm him, tells the boy three stories, none of them delivering pat messages or answers. It’s a short course in the complexities and contradictions of life.

“There is not always a good guy, Conor O’Malley,” the tree tells him at one point, “nor is there always a bad one.”

The goal is to induce Conor to tell his own story — that is, to admit to himself what he really feels and wants. When he finally does — Mr. MacDougall is quite good, by the way — a climactic scene more frightening than all the ones before brings the boy some closure, or at least some understanding of how to cope with a world that can be harsh.

It’s a catharsis painted with bold, noisy imagery, one that makes death an overwhelming tsunami. If you prefer to view dying as a natural part of life, a step in a cycle, this film will feel discordant and perhaps counterproductive. But visually it will certainly stick with you, and your children.

Read Full review at New York times

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

 Liam Neeson stars in sweet, sad fantasy  

Neeson voices a monster who helps a bullied boy cope with his mother’s terminal illness in a dramatic, affecting tale  

Director of The Orphanage, shows how a child’s fantasy can make sense of the world and our feelings about it: we create our own monsters to exorcise anger and grief. This sweet, sad movie reminded me at various stages of Let the Right One In, Pan’s Labyrinth and Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man; there’s also a briefly visible model of Frankenstein’s monster, maybe alluding to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. It is based on an idea by children’s author Siobhan Dowd, who poignantly conceived of the story as she was dying of cancer; Patrick Ness wrote the book and the screenplay adaptation.

Newcomer Lewis MacDougall plays Conor, a lonely kid whose mum (Felicity Jones) is dying; he is bullied at school and hates his overbearing grandma, played by Sigourney Weaver with that slightly too-slow voice some US stars use when they do British accents. Toby Kebbell plays his estranged dad. In the depths of his despair, Conor is visited by a gigantic monster voiced by Liam Neeson, who appears out of a yew tree in the local churchyard and tells him mysterious stories over successive nights, dramatised in animated sequences. This is an affecting movie with a lump-in-the-throat ending, but I have to confess to finding its fantasy quotient a bit twee, and the non-fantasy scenes are themselves flavoured by a self-consciously imaginary storybook quality that took the sucrose content too high.

 Read full review at The Guardian

Taking a much less intense look at a family in jeopardy than he did in The Impossible, his story of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, J.A. Bayona embraces fairy tales in A Monster Calls. British pre-teen Conor (Lewis MacDougall) has been having horrific nightmares during his mother's long illness, watching over and over as a hole opens violently in the earth beneath a nearby church. So it's almost not surprising when, late one night, the majestic old tree beside that church writhes wildly into life, stomps over to the child's window, and announces (in Liam Neeson's voice), "I have come to get you."

The tree (it's a yew tree, and viewers may draw their own conclusions about the homophone there) promises that he'll return on three subsequent nights to tell Conor a story, then demand a fourth tale from him in return. In the daytimes between these visits, though, Conor must contend with bullying at school and the prospect of being looked after by his chilly grandmother (Sigourney Weaver, with an iffy English accent). As neither is very happy-making, he spends lots of time drawing (surprisingly well) in notebooks.

When the monster comes back (the camera notices that it's at 12:07 a.m. each night), he insists that Conor mentally envision each story as vividly as he can. The film brings the tales to life stylishly, with a mix of techniques that often echo Conor's drawing style. Each starts off like familiar storybook stuff — widowed king who remarries evil witch; prince who loses his lovely girlfriend — before wrapping up unexpectedly. When the new queen turns out not to be evil, for instance, depriving us of the payoff we expect, the monster defends his story thusly: "Many things that are true feel like a cheat."

So it goes each night. And while we don't really need for Conor's literature teacher to spell things out by insisting there are "two sides to every story," the movie's nocturnal exploration of gray areas and misplaced sympathies sheds light on the messier details of Conor's family life. There's Dad, for instance (Toby Kebbell, star of Black Mirror's brilliant episode "The Entire History of You"). Dad divorced Mom and started a new family in America; visiting Conor now, he has to make his concern for his ex jibe with the fact that they split. Sometimes, he explains, love stories end "messily ever after."

Even more than The Orphanage, which was executive produced by Guillermo del Toro, this monster-and-fairy-tale film shows the Mexican auteur's influence. The yew tree's branches wrap scarily around the boy, swallowing him up as the storytelling takes over his imagination; the tree's magic doesn't solve the boy's problems by "poof!"-ing them away, but by altering his understanding of the world.

Patrick Ness' screenplay, adapted from his own 2011 book, hits the emotional notes required by an illness-centered family drama with grace (Jones gets a particularly good sickbed speech, and delivers it beautifully), but also shows finesse in playing this side of the film against its fantasy. Surprised when his grief-fueled outbursts of violence aren't punished by parents or principals, Conor is asked more than once, "What could possibly be the point?" The fact that not every terrible thing can be remedied or appropriately punished is a tough lesson even for adults to learn, but A Monster Calls helps find the sense in it.

 Read full review at Hollywood Reporter