A Monster Calls (2016)

The yew tree at the edge of the churchyard comes alive at seven minutes past midnight, and a twelve-year-old boy named Conor is given three stories and one demand: tell the truth. J. A. Bayona directs this arrangement with genuine visual craft, and the result is a sincere, well-made film about a mother dying of an unspecified illness. It is not, and this matters for the record, a document of social instruction. The cast is white, British, and unremarked upon. There is no romantic or identity subplot of any kind. The mother and the grandmother are drawn with real texture, but the film advances no argument about gender, and it would be startled by the suggestion. The family's hardship is medical and emotional. Nobody proposes that the economic order is at fault. We set the dials to zero and move on.

The Monster's parables do carry instruction. A prince murders his beloved and blames the queen. A parson betrays his convictions and loses his house. A man invisible to everyone summons a monster to punish the crowd and ends up more alone than before. These are lessons about the messiness of human beings, delivered in a low rumble by Liam Neeson. The instruction is existential and therapeutic, aimed at one grieving boy, not at an audience that requires correction. This is the only needle that twitches on the panel, and it twitches faintly.

Commercially, the film was a cautionary tale of its own: forty-seven million worldwide against a forty-three million budget, a thirteenth-place finish, and one of the steepest third-week theater drops on record. Critics were generous. Audiences handed it an A. Adapted from Patrick Ness's own novel, it remains a humane, unhappy artifact from a moment when a film could be sad without also being a position paper. Commendable. Also barren. We file it under grief, and we close the drawer quietly so as not to wake it.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}