The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)

Eli Roth, a filmmaker whose earlier reputation rested on the enthusiastic deployment of viscera, here directs a PG-rated adaptation of John Bellairs's 1973 novel, and the result is a curious artifact: a Halloween-season Amblin pastiche about an orphaned boy, a warlock uncle, and a house that ticks. The year is 1955. The setting is New Zebedee, Michigan. The stakes are the end of all human history, which the film treats with the breezy confidence of a Saturday matinee. It is competently assembled, warmly performed, and almost entirely devoid of the cultural preoccupations that define the current moment. This is not a criticism. It is a classification.

The cast places Renee Elise Goldsberry and Vanessa Anne Williams in supporting roles, and both are good, but the film makes no argument about their presence and asks the audience to make none either. Cate Blanchett's Florence is a witch of genuine competence who fights, casts, and solves problems alongside her male counterparts, though the screenplay never pauses to congratulate itself for the arrangement. Lewis grieves, flails socially, and finds his power by releasing his pain, a psychological arc the film presents as ordinary childhood difficulty and not as a clinical condition requiring a label. The villain's motivations are rooted in the horrors he witnessed during the Second World War, which supplies atmosphere and a reason for his misanthropy, not a revisionist reading of the conflict. There is no economic grievance here, no ecological anxiety, no interrogation of beauty standards, and no romantic subplot beyond a schoolyard crush.

We are left with a film about a clock, a boy, and the modest business of growing up in a creaky house. It opened at number one, charmed audiences to the tune of a B+ CinemaScore, and has since settled into the comfortable obscurity of the streaming catalog. The progressive sensibilities are faint, arriving mostly in the form of capable women and a diverse supporting cast who are simply present. The sermon is never delivered because no sermon was written. A gentle, unremarkable vintage.