All bark and no bite

A Monster Calls is a fantasy drama about a young boy whose life is crap, basically. His mother is sick. His father has scarpered. He is being bullied at school. He may also have an itch he can’t get at, for all we know. (Always hateful, that.) But he finds an ally when the ancient yew tree he can see from his window morphs into the giant tree monster who’ll take him on a journey of ‘courage, faith and truth’. This has its visually wondrous moments, and the lead (Lewis MacDougall) is a true find, but there’s too much bark, too little bite. This is no Pan’s Labyrinth, for example. Wish that it were, but it is not.

Based on the bestselling book by Patrick Ness, and directed by J. A. Bayona (The Orphanage), it is set in England and in the first few minutes we are plunged into a turbulent nightmare. This is the nightmare as regularly dreamed by our boy, Conor (MacDougall), who must be 13 or thereabouts. Conor dreams of a church tumbling to the ground, cracking, splintering and cleaving as a hole opens up in the earth below. His mother is there and she’s falling into the hole and he’s holding on to her for dear life but she’s slipping, slipping, slipping …he wakes up.

It is a vivid beginning, and a powerful beginning, of the kind that gets your hopes up. Just as, when the ‘monster’ first writhes into branch-cracking life and appears at Conor’s window as a fiery-eyed giant (voiced by Liam Neeson and quite like a Transformer, but leafier), that also gets your hopes up. But hopes raised are soon dashed by the sheer psychological banality of the underlying story.