J.A. Bayona’s third feature film is an adaptation of Patrick Ness’ novel that introduces us to Connor (Lewis MacDougall) a fraught, young boy raised by a single mom (Felicity Jones) who is battling a terminal illness. Neither Connor nor his mother want to admit the inevitable—she is dying—because doing so would require both characters to disclose emotions that may hurt the other. Despite the efforts of his dour grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) and his distant father (Tony Kebbell), Connor refuses to abandon his narrative wherein the medical treatments work on Mom, he doesn’t have to live with Grandma, and he and Mom can go back to watching classic monster films and have a happily ever after. However, Connor’s attempt at a self-made fairytale is truncated by a Monster (Liam Neeson) who appears at 12:07am to tell Connor stories of morally ambiguous characters in exchange for one story from Connor: the truth about himself, his nightmare.
At the beginning of the film, the Monster describes Connor as a boy “too old to be a kid, and too young to be a man.” And this is true; Connor has experienced so much pain that he cannot retreat into child-like innocence, for it has dissipated. Psychologically, however, he can’t “grow up and be brave,” as his dad curtly says, because is only beginning to process his circumstance.
While the story line itself is enough to convince us that the Monster is right about Connor, it is the cinematography that makes us feel Connor’s existential impasse. Throughout the film there are shots of Connor vainly pushing on locked doors or peering into rooms he’s not supposed to enter. Then there are shots of Connor apprehensively standing in front of slightly opened doors that he is supposed to walk through but won’t. However, if cinematography isn’t your thing, then you may find the water color brush stoke animations of the Monster’s stories visually exhilarating – the CGI Monster doesn’t even come close to the mesmerizingly haunted aesthetics of those animated sequences.
There are times when the film’s plot sullenly meanders, spending more time than it needed on supporting characters and overstuffing scenes with unnecessary shots and dialogue, (see Connor’s car ride with his Grandmother as a chief instance). However, Boyana and crew are able to the film at pace that keeps the film from becoming fantasy melodrama.
Most frighteningly, this film portrays our paradoxical relationship with stories. Like Connor, we have a propensity to cling to stories that provide us with straightforward frameworks for life, fantasies that enable us to escape from the not so happily ever afters. For a time, such stories are healthy coping mechanisms, but in the end we need the stories which we can’t control; the wild stories which “chase, bite, and hunt,” as the Monster poignantly states, because “humans are complicated beasts.” A Monster Calls also reminds us that even when we stubbornly try to hide from these untamed stories, they will find us and enable us to accept the painful truths about ourselves and our circumstances and dare to move forward.