When he is scared, the yew tree doesn’t tell him to stop being afraid. When Conor is angry, he acts angrily in destructive ways - but the film doesn’t chide him for it. Blending watercolor animation and fantastical elements with heart-wrenching live-action, it keeps subverting expectations. A Monster Calls is effective because its setup is familiar, but its execution isn’t. This is practically a laundry list of bad things that can happen to a 12-year-old, and it feels, at the start, as if the movie is going to be ponderously derivative.īut by the end, there’s nothing conventional about it. Though occasionally overwrought, A Monster Calls is honest and imaginativeĪll the plot elements of A Monster Calls - the bully, the distant dad, the sweet mother, the stern grandmother, and, of course, the monster who only appears to Conor - seem like conventional coming-of-age material. And as the situation worsens, Conor keeps looking for ways to form the questions he wants answered.
But the monster continues to visit him, even after Conor’s mother goes to the hospital and he moves in with his grandmother. He tells Conor fairy tales that deviate from the usual happy ending, which confuses and frustrates Conor, who doesn’t know the point of the stories.
Then, one night, the yew tree comes knocking ( Liam Neeson), a giant monster-like form that isn’t kind to Conor, but is there to help him all the same. He grabs her hand, but loses her in the dream every time. Every night, Conor dreams that a giant sinkhole opens up beneath the church, and the graveyard - and his mother - is sucked into it. The home Conor and his mother live in looks out onto a graveyard outside a church, with an enormous yew tree hanging over it. Conor’s mother conceals the degree of her sickness from him, but he suspects anyhow. His parents split up when he was small, and his father ( Toby Kebbell) lives in Los Angeles now with his new wife and child. Lewis MacDougall and Felicity Jones in A Monster Calls.Ĭonor likes to paint and draw, things his mother also liked to do before she had him. When he’s not at home, he’s trying not to get bullied at school. Worried for his mother, and frustrated by the ways his grandmother ( Sigourney Weaver) interferes with their life together, Conor spends most of his time at home. In A Monster Calls, a young boy struggles to process his mother’s terminal illnessīased on a novel by Patrick Hess, A Monster Calls is the story of a 12-year-old English boy named Conor ( Lewis MacDougall) and his mother ( Felicity Jones), who has cancer and not very long to live.
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