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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

A Monster Calls is manipulative and hollow

A MONSTER CALLS (J.A. Bayona). 108 minutes. Opens Friday (January 6). See listing. Rating: NN


After the naturalistic disaster thriller The Impossible, Spanish director J.A. Bayona returns to the dark, fantastical realm of his 2007 breakout The Orphanage for another tale of mothers, children and death.

This one – based on Patrick Ness’s 2011 YA novel – follows Conor (Lewis MacDougall), a bullied 12-year-old in a small English village whose mother (Felicity Jones) is slowly dying of cancer. And then, one night, a giant tree monster arrives at his window promising to tell him three stories in exchange for a fourth.

Bayona realizes the monster’s stories in impressionistic animated sequences, and makes the CG creature – visually a cross between Swamp Thing and Groot from Guardians Of The Galaxy, and voiced with tenderness and fury by Liam Neeson – as “real” as possible.

But the material doesn’t echo Conor’s home life quite the way Bayona wants it to. Instead of feeling like an eerie parallel, it plays as a distraction from an urgent family drama.

And if you can’t connect to the characters – as I couldn’t – A Monster Calls just feels awfully manipulative and hollow.

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