That's the perspective J.A. Bayona's A Monster Calls chooses to make front and center as it explores the plight of Conor O'Malley (Lewis MacDougall), a boy who is, in the words of the opening narration, "too old to be a kid, too young to be a man". Conor is grappling with his mother's cancer, an affliction she's carried for years now, but it's come back with a vengeance now. Extended hospital stays occur for his mother (played by Felicity Jones) and he's forced to stay with his over-controlling grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) while his school life consists of him being a social outcast that receives intense bullying on a regular basis. He is a lost soul, angry at the world and all the events occurring to his Mum and himself.
Angry. Now there's a word not typically used to describe the hardships faced by youngsters. Sadness is the go-to emotion for when kids in pop culture typically go through times of hardship, and there's plenty of sadness in Conor's reaction to his Mum's sickness, as there should be. But it is refreshing as hell to see Conor's immediate response to all that has befallen his family (his parents are also divorced, with his Dad living in America) to come in the form of pure rage at the world. This is not a sanitized look at how younger individuals cope with tragic events beyond their control, no, Conor yells, he breaks things, he's a frustrated disturbed individual who feels like an accurate true-to-life representation of how kids actually mentally process these kind of life-changing occurrences.As I said before, childhood is not an easy thing to endure and neither is the experience of coping with tremendous grief for the first time ever that tends to occur in that specific timeframe of one's life.
As all of this is happening to Conor, he is unexpectedly visited by a most unusual being, a massive bark-covered creature called The Monster (Liam Neeson). He has come to Conor to tell him some tales, a prospect that Conor finds to be one not at all useful to his current predicament. These various yarns that The Monster spins for young Conor feel very much like classic fairy tales in the best sense of the word; they carry notable important morals, but also carry a sense of violence that those old timey Brothers Grimm fables and the ilk carried. They're all told by way of some gorgeous looking animation that is visually reminiscent of the animation style used to tell the Tale Of The Three Brothers in the first Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows movie, a strong stylistic choice that only furthers the prominent unique visual aesthetic that permeates A Monster Calls.
That titular monster is a similarly noteworthy visual feat, brought to life by way of splendid computer animation and one whose very presence in any given scene offers plenty of chances for memorable shots or frames that cinematographer Oscar Faura very much leaps upon. Faura really takes advantage of the size of this Monster to towers over both the audience and Conor to create a sense of immediate grandeur that's hard to shake off. And this beast opens his mouth and out pours the vocal pipes of Liam Neeson who gives an absolutely outstanding vocal performance as The Monster. Neeson is able to really bring in a vital layer of gravitas in his voice over work that gives a worldly personality to this visually commanding creation.
The introduction of a more fantastical element into this more grounded tale of anguish could have lead to disaster easily, but thankfully, the screenplay by Patrick Ness (who actually wrote the book on which this film is based) handles the merging of the two elements with a deft hand. Those two types of elements (the heightened and the realistic) co-exist in emotionally stimulating harmony. Both from a writing and visual perspective, A Monster Calls is remarkable well-equipped to handle both sides of the atmospheric equation that this story presents. The fantastical fairy tales and visits between Conor and The Monster are equally as engaging in terms of both the dialogue and the way its show as a small lunchtime chat between Conor and his Dad over maybe Conor coming to Los Angeles and visiting his distant father.
You'll probably have noticed by now how none of the adults I've mentioned in this review carry names. Well, that's an intentional choice on the part of A Monster Calls, which tells the entire story from the perspective youngster Conor, who's of course not gonna refer to his parents by first names. This echoes a similar choice seen in that classic comic strip Calvin & Hobbes with both pieces of art making this decision as a way to show how much distance there is between their younger protagonists and the real world in that they only see their parents as just that...parents, not yet people. This makes it all the more painful when Conor catches fleeting glimpses of his mother in pain from the procedures she's undergoing to deal with her cancer or the gradually revealed vulnerability in his grandmother.
But all of this may have been for naught if actor Lewis MacDougall (whose only acting credit prior to this movie was a tiny role in the 2015 debacle Pan) had fumbled in the lead role. This entire movie rests on his shoulders and, thankfully, he rises to the challenge and then some, bringing to life this very realistic depiction of a boy in pain. His anger and sadness are so well-executed in his performance you get swept up by such emotions yourself, it's a tremendous achievement on his part. What a fitting lead performance then for such a high-quality movie like A Monster Calls, an incredibly gripping feature that grabs you by the tear ducts and proceeds to take you on an introspective journey through the process of experiencing grief at such a young age.
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