Before “A Monster Calls” powerfully overflows its banks with deeply felt tides of emotion. Before you are trying to keep watching the screen through eyes welled with tears, the first thing you’ll notice about young Conor (Lewis MacDougall) — who is “too old to be a kid, yet too young to be a man” — is that he’s tired. He’s tired and angry. His mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) is dying, he’s being bullied at school, his father (Toby Kebbell) lives halfway around the world with a new family in California, and should things turn for the worst, Conor will have to live with his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver). It’s too much for anyone to shoulder, let alone a child who is still coming-of-age, and so Conor does the only thing that makes any sense: he summons a monster.
However, in this film, the monster is not a lizard, or something created by some kind of midnight madness freak of nature convergence — it’s simply an ancient yew tree located in the churchyard in the distance from Conor’s bedroom window that comes to life. Ripping its roots out of ground, it stomps to Conor’s window, eyes glowing like fiery coals, standing taller than any of the other homes in the neighborhood. In fact, The Monster could probably hold them in the palm of his hand. Whether it’s a dream or fantasy or reality, it hardly matters because for Conor, The Monster (voiced by Liam Neeson), is all he has at the moment to help him make sense of his world that is becoming more difficult to navigate and understand. And The Monster is willing to help, but not without some conditions: The Monster will arrive on three different nights, and tell Conor a new story each time, but on the fourth night, it will be Conor’s turn to tell The Monster a story.
Based on the book by Patrick Ness, who also penned the screenplay, this beautifully structured fable may be focused on the specific pain, of a specific child, during a specific moment in time, but it blows up every fragment of its premise into heart-stirring universal appeal. Part of this is attributed to each of the tales spun by The Monster — brought to life with some gorgeous, watercolor-style animation — which resonates with the timelessness of Hans Christian Andersen stories. However, “A Monster Calls” connects with anyone who has grappled with the sting of loss, the devastation of grief, or struggled with the ways in which the world can sometimes just be unfathomably cruel. The purity with which the film transmits that often overwhelming and indescribable feeling can’t be overstated: “A Monster Calls” reaches deep inside to where your own emotions are rooted, and makes you consider the soil they’ve been knotted in.
Certainly, there’s a version of this movie that’s manipulative, that overstretches and overreaches, manufacturing scenes and speeches to wring tears on expected beats. And one could say director J.A. Bayona has himself been guilty of that, particularly with his 2012 disaster drama, “The Impossible.” But here, Conor’s despair manifests through bursts of anger or retreats into isolation and silence. There are no speeches for him to make because what he’s experiencing is inchoate; for all the wild imagination of Conor’s time with The Monster, when he’s back in the real world that he has to contend with, all he can do is either lash out blindly or turn inward. It results in the confusion and hurt he feels being left to simmer and boil, until the moment he knew was coming, that he couldn’t face, finally arrives, and Ness and Bayona avoid an explosion, but choose a slow release that reflects real life, and how heartbreak never just comes and goes in a moment — it’s sometimes a sensation we have to learn to live with.
While the film features the excellent work we expect from the Oscar-nominated Felicity Jones, tender voicing from Liam Neeson, and solid supporting turns Sigourney Weaver and Toby Kebbell, “A Monster Calls” rests on the shoulders of newcomer Lewis MacDougall and he’s a discovery. From saucer-eyed and vulnerable to fist-clenchingly upset, and most importantly, both of those at once, his Conor is raw, a child who is learning too soon that the universe will cheat at the game of life and death, and the young actor movingly weaves his way through all of those notes.
It’s a curious thing about being human that love and loss are often inexorably connected. At some point, we’ll have to let go of those we hold closest, and the notion of “happily ever after” in its purest sense is something almost no one ever gets. But the wisdom that “A Monster Calls” dazzlingly shares is that we can hurt and learn and survive the messily ever afters that will inevitably touch our hearts. [A]
This is a reprint of our review from the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.
