A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls (2016) is about a boy whose mother is dying being visited at night by a monster. Conor is thirteen. His mother is in treatment and not recovering. He is beaten at school, his father lives in another country, and he cannot get on with his grandmother. Every night he has the same nightmare. One night the yew tree in the garden moves and starts speaking. The monster proposes a bargain: it will tell three stories, then Conor will tell a fourth, and his will be the truth. The stories it tells contain no lesson. In each one a good person does something bad and is not punished; someone assumed to be wicked turns out to be right. Conor is angry at this, and the monster's answer is that people are complicated and can want two things at once. The real subject is what happens in Conor's nightmare and why he cannot tell anyone. It is something he has hidden even from himself, and saying it is the peak of the film. It is adapted from Patrick Ness's novel. The idea was Siobhan Dowd's; she died of cancer before she could write it and Ness wrote it from her notes. J. A. Bayona directed. Liam Neeson voices the monster. The stories are told in watercolour animation and are the loveliest thing in the film. Felicity Jones plays the mother and Sigourney Weaver the grandmother. It runs 108 minutes. Good for: fantasy drama, films about grief, and animation hybrids. Less good for: a child loses his mother and the film does not soften it at all.