The Book of Henry (2017)

Colin Trevorrow's The Book of Henry believes it has located something profound in a suburban cul-de-sac. What it has located is a sniper rifle, a brain tumor, and a child who day-trades. An eleven-year-old genius manages his family's finances, notices that the girl next door is being hurt, and, upon learning he is dying of cancer, leaves his mother a notebook explaining how to murder the man responsible. The tonal shifts here are not jarring so much as geological. The film moves from whimsy to bereavement to assassination logistics without pausing to catch its breath or anyone else's.

As a barometer of modern progressive sensibilities, the film reads as a curiosity, mostly for what it declines to notice. The town is white, the abuse is white, and race is never engaged as a subject. The gender politics are stranger still. Susan, the mother, is the nominal protagonist, yet she is written as a woman who cannot pay a bill or process a feeling without her prepubescent son guiding her, which makes her climactic agency feel less like empowerment than a delayed adolescence. Henry's stock market investing is presented as a noble act of family provision, a small paean to capital that nobody in the film thinks to question.

The film does carry a faint moral hum, a suggestion that bystanders who can act against cruelty have an obligation to do so. It arrives through melodrama and a principal's last-minute conscience, not through argument, and it lands softly. There is nothing here about the climate, nothing about queerness, nothing about bodies, and nothing about neurodivergence, since Henry's brilliance is treated as precocity and his tumor as a plot mechanism. The result is a film with the moral vocabulary of a greeting card and the third act of a thriller, a combination that has been attempted before and should perhaps remain so.

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