MirrorMask

Helena, fifteen and raised in a travelling circus, wants to run away from it into a normal life. On the day she quarrels with her mother, the woman falls ill and is taken into surgery. That night Helena wakes inside a world built from her own drawings: two kingdoms, a lost charm and a queen with her mother's face. The light is going out and it falls to her to bring it back. The film is not interested in fantastical adventure. It is interested in guilt: Helena had told her mother she wished she were dead, and the dream world is built entirely on that sentence. The dark queen is the girl's own anger. The form is design throughout: Dave McKean's drawing and collage aesthetic carried straight onto the screen, with live actors placed into digital backgrounds. The image is deliberately flat and painterly. Dave McKean directed from a screenplay by Neil Gaiman. It was made for the Jim Henson Company on a budget of around four million dollars; at that scale a fantasy world could only be built through digital design, and the film's look comes directly from that constraint. Stephanie Leonidas plays Helena and Rob Brydon her father. Who it is for: viewers who like films that put visual design ahead of story, and admirers of Gaiman and McKean. Who it is not for: anyone wanting narrative flow. The plot is thin, the second half is slow and the digital imagery looks dated now.