Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Readers of the novel will notice the swap first. In the book Emma controls fire and Olive floats; the film reverses them, a call made by the screenwriter Jane Goldman together with Tim Burton and the producers. Ella Purnell, who plays Emma, argued that a fiery heroine was already common on screen while a girl tethered by a rope belonged in Burton’s world. The adaptation keeps moving away from the page. Barron, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is several book characters folded into one, and the ending diverges sharply, so anyone following the story in print will open the second volume somewhere else entirely. The look comes out of real places. The island off Wales was shot largely in the Cornish hamlet of Portholland, where the pub and the shopfronts were built for the production. The house exterior is Torenhof Castle in Brasschaat, Belgium, chosen because it read as a home rather than a grand estate, and Emma’s levitation scene was filmed in the circus ring inside Blackpool Tower. For a viewer who accepts 127 minutes that introduce about ten children and hand most of them a single trait. Not for one who wants the melancholy fairy tale to stay melancholy, since the last half hour turns into a skeleton fight and a chase along a pier.