JA Bayona, director of The Orphanage, shows how a child’s fantasy can make sense of the world and our feelings about it: we create our own monsters to exorcise anger and grief. This sweet, sad movie reminded me at various stages of Let the Right One In, Pan’s Labyrinth and Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man; there’s also a briefly visible model of Frankenstein’s monster, maybe alluding to Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. It is based on an idea by children’s author Siobhan Dowd, who poignantly conceived of the story as she was dying of cancer; Patrick Ness wrote the book and the screenplay adaptation.
Newcomer Lewis MacDougall plays Conor, a lonely kid whose mum (Felicity Jones) is dying; he is bullied at school and hates his overbearing grandma, played by Sigourney Weaver with that slightly too-slow voice some US stars use when they do British accents. Toby Kebbell plays his estranged dad. In the depths of his despair, Conor is visited by a gigantic monster voiced by Liam Neeson, who appears out of a yew tree in the local churchyard and tells him mysterious stories over successive nights, dramatised in animated sequences. This is an affecting movie with a lump-in-the-throat ending, but I have to confess to finding its fantasy quotient a bit twee, and the non-fantasy scenes are themselves flavoured by a self-consciously imaginary storybook quality that took the sucrose content too high.
