A Monster Calls (2016)
Directed by J. A. Bayona
12-year-old Conor encounters an ancient tree monster who proceeds to help him cope with his mother's terminal illness and being bullied in school.
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31 films that influenced A Monster Calls
What critics say influenced A Monster Calls
Reminiscent of this year’s The BFG and 1999’s The Iron Giant, with stories entailing burgeoning relationships between young children and hulking creatures, A Monster Calls brings a unique take in its construction.
Though ostensibly aimed at children, or at least teens (check that PG-13 rating), it’s more heavy on darkness and light on fun than other movies in its conceptual wheelhouse, like the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Henry Selick’s Coraline or Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant.
More likely, “A Monster Calls” will join a long list of tragic box-office disappointments (of which “The Iron Giant” is probably the closest analogy) that are embraced as cult classics by such fantasy connoisseurs years down the road.
Lo más reciente de Bayona es parte The Iron Giant, parte Pan’s Labyrinth y parte The BFG.
The animated portions remind in feeling and abstraction of Brad Bird's incomparable The Iron Giant--a film that is itself based around the death of a loved one and the need for the survivors to recover.
A Monster Calls is a difficult movie to categorize, looking something like The Iron Giant by way of The NeverEnding Story, but in the end resembling neither.
Compared to the cartoonish effects of Steven Spielberg’s “The BFG” earlier this year, this monster is downright menacing, a hulking terror that suggests what might happen if Groot from “Guardians of the Galaxy” took steroids and wandered into “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
This powerful effect doesn’t seem so likely at the beginning, when the film resembles a stripped down version of Pan’s Labyrinth.
It almost goes without saying that Neeson’s rumbling tones are a perfect fit for the monster, whose size and murky agenda make him an endearing mix of Ted Hughes’ Iron Giant and the Faun from Pan’s Labyrinth (and a little bit of Groot).
A mix of C.G.I. spectacle and heavy emotional drama, director J.A. Bayona’s film, based on Patrick Ness’s novel, occasionally feels like one of those arty children’s movies that earn awards and acclaim—Where the Wild Things Are, or the revered Pan’s Labyrinth (which isn’t really a children’s movie).
Aided by the gothic production design of Eugenio Caballero (Oscar winner for Pan’s Labyrinth), the first half of the film exhibits a mystical, fairytale quality.
In this grief drama with a touch of fantasy (think Pan’s Labyrinth), director J.A. Bayona proves wholly adept at crafting a tale of genuine emotion that is packed with imagination and sincerity, offering up a strangely cathartic fairy tale of sorts that never lets the fantasy overwhelm the character drama.
The live-action portions, the best of them, remind of Bernard Rose's melancholic Paperhouse, but the sum is a bit less than its parts.
The boy and his beloved mom have moments of respite, enjoying a 16mm print of the 1933 “King Kong” together, with Mom telling Conor it was a favorite of his late grandfather, who was the only person who could get Grandma to lighten up.
He wriggles like Fay Wray (he has recently been watching King Kong on his mum’s old cine projector), yet this is no love story, unless you count tough love, and it’s no BFG -style buddy movie, either.
They are triggered by his seeing 1933’s King Kong, which he and Mum watch as a home movie unspooling on her late father’s vintage projector – Bayona’s almost-meta doff-of-the-cap to the power of celluloid.
In an organic payoff that packs an emotional wallop, Conor comes to comprehend his mother’s enduring legacy—one that encompasses a 16mm print of the 1933 King Kong and her own painterly daydreams.
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A Monster Calls is a difficult movie to categorize, looking something like The Iron Giant by way of The NeverEnding Story, but in the end resembling neither.
Monster is akin to '80s family classics that take a child on a quest of identity such as The NeverEnding Story, though Bayona gives his take a realistic and imaginative modern touch.
It has some genuine affinities with the underrated 1986 “ Labyrinth ,” in which Jennifer Connelly confronted a looming transition from girlhood to womanhood via a fantasy realm ruled by an elfin David Bowie .
It’s like the old Jim Henson movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
With its open-ended expansiveness and mastery of a child’s point of view, watching A Monster Calls gave me the reverberating pleasures I had watching Potter’s Lewis Carroll film, Dreamchild (directed by Gavin Millar).
The climactic scene in which Conor finally confronts his horrible dream echoes a similarly tortured Conrad Jarrett’s revelatory confession in the psychiatrist’s office near the end of Ordinary People.
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It’s like the old Jim Henson movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
For veteran film fans, it is an oddity that Geraldine Chaplin, from “Doctor Zhivago,” has a small part as a school official.