Review of A Monster Calls (2016) by Chris O — 12 Jan 2017

Review - A Monster Calls.

Make that call and let the monster take your pain away.

In life, we are all guaranteed to deal with unexpected tragedies. Most of the time people aren't prepared to deal with these events and need someone to guide them through their pain. Sometimes that someone may be a tree monster voice by Liam Neeson.

This tree monster (Neeson) is called by Connor (Lewis MacDougall) when his mother (Falicity Jones) is struck with terminal cancer and Connor refuses to accept the inevitable fate that his mother is going to face. There is something here that is relatable for everyone, because everyone in life is going to have to deal with the hardships that life is going to offer.

Some people will never obtain that happily-ever-after ending, but they are thankful that they were able to experience life and the beauty it has to offer. A Monster Calls does a brilliant job of telling the audiences that life can be cruel indeed, but life is also beautiful if they want it to be. Life is always going to end up being what people make of it.

In a world that is becoming crowded with coming-of-age movies, Director J.A Bayona decided to take a different approach in terms of story-telling and visual art. Ambitious and thought-provoking, this acute deviation from traditional story-telling is this movies biggest strength, but also its glaring weakness.

The themes of loss, grief, becoming your own man and coming to terms with tragedy are all here even when the themes are confusing at times. These themes are told through the tree monsters 3 artistic, water-colored, pop-out book style fairy-tales to the boy at exactly 12:07 each day. Some people will find these tales to be an artistic achievement, while others will find them distracting and pretentious.

However, where previous entries in the genre collapse under its risk-taking, A Monster Calls succeeds. The long journey that the monster was taking the boy on and climax that the stories were leading the audience to, pays off in the end and delivers one of the most thought-provoking, emotional and satisfying revelations in recent year. Everything that the monster was preparing the audience for felt earned and the pay-off was worth the hour and 48 mins it took to get there.

Life is filled with beauty, but life is also filled with tragedy. How people cope with tragedy is up them, but should a tree monster ever come to their window to offer his help, they should open their hearts and let him heal them.

A Monster Calls is a delightful surprise and audiences will be glad they made the call.

8.5/10.