The School for Good and Evil (2022)

Paul Feig's adaptation of Soman Chainani's young adult novel arrives with the full apparatus of a streaming fantasy: elaborate Art Nouveau sets, eight hundred costumes, and a running time that suggests nobody in the edit bay was willing to lose an argument. Two girls, Sophie and Agatha, are deposited at a school that trains heroes and villains, then sorted into the wrong houses. The film spends its energy on the friendship between them, which is the correct instinct, and on elaborate costume changes, which is the other instinct.

On the question of social consciousness, the production is unusually forthright. The ensemble is diverse in a way that fairy tale fantasy rarely bothers with, and the filmmakers have discussed casting decisions in those terms. More striking is the climax, in which the kiss that revives a dying Sophie comes from Agatha. The plot resolves on an act of love between two girls, and the film neither flinches from it nor makes a spectacle of it. Meanwhile, two female deans hold the institutional power, and the princess archetype takes a sustained beating. This is a film aware of its audience and its moment.

The softer registers are where it stumbles. A beauty and uglification curriculum gestures at appearance standards, and one lead's insistence on keeping her curls is a small, real intervention, but the theme never develops past a costume. The moral about inner worth arrives through plot mechanics, not sermonizing, which is to the film's credit and also to its detriment: it has little to say and says it at length. The result is a lavish, overlong, intermittently charming piece of streaming content that knows what it is for and executes it with competent enthusiasm. The critics were unkind. They were not wrong, exactly. They were simply tired.