Everything but the kitchen sink goes into this buoyant fantasy-adventure from Tim Burton, adapted by Jane Goldman from the 2011 bestseller by Ransom Riggs. It rattles amiably along, although it’s a little overextended and loses something of its control and focus by the end.
This is a sort of classic time-travel mystery: shades of Tom’s Midnight Garden and When Marnie Was There, with a touch of X-Men. There’s a nice pipe-smoking turn by Eva Green as Miss Peregrine (although like all smokers in the movies, she abandons her habit after the first few scenes) and some very creepy monsters who appear to be modelled on Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at The Base of a Crucifixion.
Asa Butterfield plays Jake, a lonely Florida teenager who is close to his eccentric grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) and becomes obsessed with Abe’s childhood at a strange Welsh school: Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children. He travels to Wales to find that this Victorian gothic pile with its gifted children exists in a 1943 time loop and its “peculiars” are now menaced by the dementor-ish “hollows” led by Samuel L Jackson with Marilyn Manson eyes, and there’s a freaky finale in Blackpool, of all surreal places. Engaging, watchable, with sweet-natured freewheeling eccentricity.
