A Monster Calls

There’s a “fertile subgenre” of movies about children whose lives are transformed by supernatural beings, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. This latest example, the affecting A Monster Calls, stars newcomer Lewis MacDougall as a young boy named Conor who takes refuge from his worries – he’s being bullied at school; his mother is dying of cancer – by sketching in his room. Then, one day, the old yew tree he can see from his window morphs into a huge tree-monster.

At first the creature, voiced by Liam Neeson, seems terrifying. But he soon turns out to be friendly. He will tell Conor three stories, he says, after which the boy must tell one in return. The idea is that stories can be a good tool for processing grief, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail – a somewhat sombre moral aimed at children in a movie too whimsical to entertain adults. Many of its scenes are
actually quite strange and memorable, said Tom Huddleston in Time Out; and MacDougall makes a “charismatic” lead. But overall one is left wondering who the film is meant for.

A Monster Calls has “too much bark, too little bite”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Its imagery is dismayingly on the nose (Conor has a recurring dream in which he fails to save his mother from falling into an abyss), and its message – that it’s “okay to grieve” – is, I fear, pretty “banal”.

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