A searing portrayal of Grief

Johnson Thomas

Juan Antonio Bayona’s ‘The Orphanage’ may have relegated him to the cult genre mold but it’s his ‘The Impossible’ which really caught the critics’ eyes and won him his slew of awards. ‘A Monster Calls’ embraces both worlds. It has a monster in it and tells a searing tale of pain and guilt that merges conventional plot forms with deeply involving reality to create a  metaphoric allegory that consumes illness, death and grief –all through the eyes of a 12 year old Conor (Lewis MacDougall) who seems all about to go over the edge while the sole anchor of his life, his young single mother (An achingly real Felicity Jones) grapples with preparing her son for the foregone outcome of her terminal illness. This is a powerful film that gains it’s ideology from an award winning YA novel by Patrick Ness, who also wrote the screenplay (the book itself was initially conceived as an idea by the late writer Siobhan Dowd).

Highly imaginative, this film provides an intimate glimpse into a traumatised adolescent mind. The boy’s father, (Toby Kebbell) who lives with his new family in Los Angeles and his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver), a stern intimidating figure, who at the outset seems entirely disagreeable, are aliens in his troubled mind. Conor knows that all the adults in his life, however well-intentioned, are lying to him. So his grief-savaged sub-conscious mind conjures up a frenemy, tree monster (Liam Neeson), that will help him come to terms with the unassailable truth of his existence. But Conor’s conscious mind is still not ready for that eventual catharsis. Will he be able to return to consonance before his mother’s eventual demise, is a question we’re all left grappling with right up to the heart-stopping climax.  

Director Juan Antonio Bayona attempts to recapture the book’s unique appeal and manages it with great similitude. The result is an amazing array of taut emotion wracked moments combined with inspirational animation special effects that open out the ravaged mind of a troubled youth with explosive depth.  The visuals are arresting and compare favorably even to  Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ – which is saying a lot about the cinematographer-director duo involved here. Spielberg’s ‘BFG’ may bear emblematic resemblance but this one is far deeper and more resonant and makes the entire experience a catharsis for pent-up grief.  The wisdom exemplified in the telling , philosophy entrenched in garnering the truth and overreaching compassion in assay makes this experience so involving that it will make you release your own demons in the process. Such is the power of this unique experience!

English Film Review

Johnson Thomas

A rarefied romantic sci-fi adventure

Film: Passengers

Cast: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne

Director: Morten Tyldum

Rating: * * *

Runtime: 116 min.

What if you were trapped on a super luxurious cruise ship travelling in outerspace, for the rest of your life? This is the premise for this beautifully appointed sci-fi adventure romance directed by Norwegian director Morten Tyldum- him of ‘The Imitation Game’ fame. 

Avalon, an ultra-automated luxury interstellar space ship is ferrying 5,000 paying passengers and 200-odd crew members, all enclosed in pods designed to keep them fresh and healthy and inanimate for the next 120-year journey from Earth to Homestead II- the antidote to an overpopulated and ravaged home planet.  

Jim Preston(Chris Pratt) is the first one to awake unexpectedly on board and after one year of trying to come to terms with his solitary existence decides to wake up a suitable partner, Aurora(Jennifer Lawrence), to make his solitary confinement more bearable. 

The film raises ethical questions and answers them in a harebrained manner, by throwing a spanner in the works- putting the forced-to-be-loved-up lives in peril and thus obliterating the need to face up to the challenging issues raised. The romance is a given, nothing mysterious or challenging about it..what else could they do marooned on a ship with no other human inhabitants awake? And the grappling with existential issues created by malfunctions in the nuclear gear of the ship makes for some hackneyed mid-space adventure thrills. There’s some ‘Gravity’ in it but not enough to draw you in entirely. Jon Spaiht’s screenplay doesn’t quite aim for any deeper inveiglements. So there's nothing beyond the serene, intriguing,  facsimile representation of space travel to keep you entranced here. The well imagined, striking visual design, seamless digital effects, along with Thomas Newman’s tempting background score is what is wondrous about this experience!

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