Paperhouse

Eleven year old Anna falls ill, is confined to bed, and the house she has drawn starts appearing in her dreams. Everything she puts on the paper exists there: the boy at the window, the lock on the door, and the father she draws in anger. Bernard Rose adapted Catherine Storr's children's novel but did not make a children's film; the dream passages are genuinely frightening because they use the actual logic of childhood fear, which is losing control of what you started. Anna's power and her curse are the same object, a pencil. The warmth is in the friction between the sick girl and her mother; the horror is in what her own anger makes. The design does a great deal with very few elements. Who it is for: viewers who like fantasy that takes childhood fear seriously. Who it is not for: anyone assuming a child lead means a family film, because this is dark.