Review of A Monster Calls (2016) by Spangle — 01 May 2017

Guillermo del Toro's protege, Juan Antonio Bayona, continues to deliver high-quality emotional gut punches with his latest work, A Monster Calls. An unfortunate box office failure earlier this year, the film is a heart wrenching tale of a boy named Conor (Lewis MacDougall) whose mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) is dying of cancer. With a hard-nosed grandmother Mrs. Chandler (Sigourney Weaver) accompanying them and providing Conor with what will be his new home, a neglectful father who lives in a different country (Toby Kebbell), and bullies at school making his life hell, Conor is visited by a monster (Liam Neeson). Arriving to teach him three lessons in life and to elicit Conor's darkest secret from him, A Monster Calls is a film about a young boy learning to cope with the loss of his mother, his own anger for how he is behaving, and how he desperately tries to grab control of something around him. Unfortunately, with everyone else collapsing all around him, there are practically no alleys to turn down but the one opened by the monster. Moving, heart-wrenching, and an absolute tearjerker, A Monster Calls is yet another score for Bayona's brand of emotional cinema set against fantastical backgrounds (The Orphanage).

While the film's depiction of a mother dying from cancer and how it impacts everyone around her is undoubtedly manipulative, Bayona picks at the viewer's heart strings so effectively and with such authentic emotion, that we hardly ever notice his hand. Gracefully put together and nimbly jumping between its hard-hitting themes about loss, grieving, and overcoming the death of a loved one, with its more adventurous and creative look at coping with a fairy tale watercolor backdrop, A Monster Calls is an excellently written and directed film that really finds a way to keep its eye on the prize. No matter what happens in the film, this is a film about a boy facing the toughest thing he has ever faced. His denial that it is happening. His rage about it happening. And finally, his acceptance that it is happening and looking ahead to how to heal and grow from the experience.

Visiting with the monster everyday at 12:07 AM, Conor must face the deepest secret he has within him and one that is all too relatable: he wants it to be over. The agony. The waiting. The pain. The anger. The suffering. The anticipation. Yes, for it to be over means that his mother Lizzie must die, but he wants it to be over. In the end, we all know this feeling. It is, honestly, one of the tougher elements of coping with the loss of a loved one, because it is tinged with regret. A Monster Calls demonstrates this perfectly with how this anger and guilt felt by Conor over how he wants this stage of his life to end manifests itself in his everyday life. From hating his grandmother and destroying her house, to rejecting his father out of anger, and to beating up his bully and sending him to the hospital, Conor copes with rage. Yet, though the expression it outwardly, it is focused entirely on himself. He loves his mother. The two have been best friends for as long as he can remember. She cuddles with him watching movies and when he is scared at night. She taught him to paint. The two are inseparable, but she must go now and he cannot accept that he wants her to go just for him to stop feeling the pain of waiting for her to go. It is a conflicting feeling and one that can destroy even the strongest of adults, let alone a teenager.

Yet, he must learn to not just overcome the impending death of his mother, but his own anger at himself. Through the stories, he learns that people are not all good or all bad, that believing something can happen is the first step to it actually happening, and that crying out for help is a sign of strength and one that will get him noticed, but to be noticed is not everything; one must be able to recognize their own pain themselves as well before it gets out of hand. It is alright to be mad and to let yourself be heard, but you cannot let it consume your entire being. Even worse, you cannot let that anger be focused inward to the point that you write yourself off as a bad person, as young Conor had done to himself for his own secrets. Each human being has two sides to them and can simultaneously be good and evil. This applies to not just Conor in the film, but also to his grandmother and father. For the former, she is losing her daughter to cancer. She has already lost her husband - with the established fact that Lizzie coped in the exact same way as Conor - and is struggling to find a way to accept that she will lose her daughter too. She takes out her anger in various ways and does boss Conor around, but she loves him and her entirely. His father loves him as well, even if things are not perfect. Yes, he re-married and has a new daughter, but he still loves Lizzie and Conor. It is just that things could not work between them and now his job has him in Los Angeles.