A Monster Calls

When the Bough Breaks
or 
That's Ent-ertainment!

Seeing a lot of depressing films can really put the zap on your head. Makes you not want to write about them. Makes you not want to see anything for awhile. But you have to resist that urge.

Because you might miss something brilliant.

Something like A Monster Calls.

A Monster Calls didn't do any "business," really. It had that icky "The BFG" feeling, the kind that keeps away audiences, even family audiences, because it seems it might be too frightening or nightmarish to families who don't think twice about taking their kids to The Avengers or some lumpen play-doh-pixel animation that won't inspire sleepless nights—for kids or their parents (Hey, Hollywood, Mom and Dad gotta sleep!) That stuff is safe, like sugar-water; it keeps them bouncing on the seat-springs for 90 minutes and when the rush is over and done with, then it's safe to put 'em in bed, with their revenge-fantasies and sermon-stories cavorting like empty calories in their heads.  And in the morning, they burst like bubbles, because there's nothing challenging there. At least, nothing like real life.

Who needs that, after all? For that, you can stay home.

Conor O'Malley (Lewis McDougall) is having a nightmare—the one "with the darkness the wind and the screaming." In it, he is in a blasted landscape, a graveyard that has opened up, more grave than yard now, and he is desperately clinging to something hanging over the edge. A look into the pit and he sees his mother (Felicity Jones...of Rogue One) desperately grasping his arm, trying to keep from falling into the abyss. But, he can't prevent it; he's just 12, somewhere as the narration tells us "too young to be an adult; too old to be a kid."

Conor wakes up from his night-mare and goes to his day-one. He makes breakfast—cold cereal—gets dressed, takes one look in at his mother and trudges to school where he sits in the back of the class, dead-eyed, rather be drawing, and notices the askance glare of the bigger bully who will beat him between classes. He's getting it from all sides: his father is absent, living in the U.S. with his new family, but who talks about visits when all Conor wants to do is escape; his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) is coming to visit and she's a brittle, stern woman who has issues of her own, Conor's struggles not being among them, with talk of living with her in her antiseptic memory-steeped brownstone; because Conor's Mum has cancer and the treatments are making her sick and weak...and not making her better—it's time for a more aggressive treatment in hospice.

Conor retreats but he can't go far. Sleep brings the nightmares and his drawings are disturbing things that one night manifests to life in the form of a an animated yew tree (voiced by Liam Neeson)—the one that sits in the graveyard of the local church—that uproots with a burning fire inside it and invades his room at precisely 12:07 am with an ominous warning; he will tell him three true tales and once those stories are complete, Conor must reciprocate with one of his own—and if the story is not true, the monster will eat him.

Pretty simple story, with Grimm elements of the macabre, but A Monster Calls is anything but simple. When the stories begin, the film warps and woofs and spatters into bizarrely wondrous illustrations that morph into surrealism and suggestivism to tell their fairy-tale stories of kingdoms and wizards and differing points of view, but each of them have an edge that defy fairy-tale logic and mannerisms, don't hew to myth but to behavior and the complexities of psyche, paths that confuse and confound Conor, shaking him down to his his own core-beliefs of childhood, uprooting his own naivete and the expected behavior of youngster-hood.

Dad comes to visit, but he can't stay long, and before you know it, he's just a memory, leaving the situation of his ex-wife and son behind to return to life in the U.S. Mum moves to the hospital, and Conor to his grandmother's, where he is a stranger and a bit of a burden, an outsider but not a center of concern. The only one who seems to notice him and pay attention to him is the Monster, who tells Conor that, rather than the Monster coming to him, maybe it is Conor who summoned his presence to him.

A Monster Calls is an anti-fairy-tale, which does not comfort; it is a kid's movie not for kid's and that they won't understand—maybe be fascinated with the graphics and the out-sized emotions, but it ultimately will run against the grain of a child's expectations of easy solutions and happily-ever-after. But, it is also a film that is so much made up of the anxieties of a child's world that is much too large for them to be comfortable in, even if they grow five times their size. The embedded stories are not safe and, though they toy with issues of good and evil like a fable, the palette gets all mixed-up and smeared with the light and the dark. The images (created by the FX-house glassworks Barcelona) are beautifully painted nightmares (they also did the Tree-Monster FX although a bit more photo-realistically) that shift along with the attitudes inhabiting its characters.

Kids don't know id's, even while they are acting out on them all the time. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, even if they don't know exactly why they are feeling what they are feeling. Children don't know the secrets of adults (most times because one of those secrets is that they're being protected from them by their parents)...that time is short, life is hard, and that eventually yesterday's outnumber tomorrow's. Kids don't need to know that time is the ultimate bully and it will beat you up and it won't wait for recess to do it.

Life is hard. That's the reality of it, but a child is sheltered from the more harsh realities of life. A child barely knows life that they should know anything about death. Nor that, at the moment of their birth they're carrying an hourglass and time is running out for the first second. Children shouldn't know that stuff. They're fed stories that conclude "...and they lived happily ever after," when there are actually no guarantees on the "happily" and a definite negative on "they lived...ever after." The curse of original sin (from the biblical stories) may not be from the tree of knowledge, but born of the knowledge of death. Death thus becomes childhood's end even as it is for another. Life is cruel that way.

No, not cruel; Life is merely indifferent. And as I've said about indifference here before, it is the opposite of love.

As I said, maybe not for children—they can't comprehend the future. But, for adults, with memories of the past, it is amazing. And if those memories involve loss, there will be tears...over the painful dichotomies of life...and death...and how both can be embraced. A Monster Calls is that special.

Right down to its anti-fairy tale roots.