FANTASY; 1hr 32min
STARRING: Tony Hale, D’Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalen Cox
Flower power: Creature and Cox
Widower Taylor Wyatt (Hale) likes to assure his desolate 10-year-old daughter, Amber (Belle), that “you can’t control your inbox, but you can control your outbox.” Wise words he should be heeding himself, for Taylor has every reason to be stressed to the max. Since their mother’s death, Amber and her older brother, Jack (Lawrence), have been rudderless while their harried dad struggles to cope. Only Taylor’s realtor sister, Liz (Carden), seems to be holding steady, laser-focused as she is on selling her brother’s family home.
While Liz shuttles prospective buyers in and out of the house, Amber funnels the overwhelming weight of her grief into an outpouring of macabre sketches. But when her sketchbook — its disquietingly embellished cover is showcased with a horror soundtrack flourish by first-time feature film-maker Seth Worley — falls into a supernatural pond, the beasties in its pages take on a life of their own.
Amber’s psychedelic icons are enough of an eye popper on the page. As a 3D reality, they’re Maurice Sendak–flavoured insanity — except that these hybrid Wild Things are all about search and destroy. (Each one of them is its own unhinged creation, but with their carroty eyeball bodies and manic scuttle, the puffball chalk spiders are every arachnophobe’s nightmare.) Mass extinction has to be the only way to go for the sake of the Wyatt’s home town and everybody in it. But how to stamp out what logically can’t exist?
If the special effects are a lunatic trip, Amber, Jack and their mouthy third wheel, Bowman (Cox), couldn’t be more grounded as they stand up to Amber’s rampaging id. Her technicolour monsters are a visionary blast, but the pain of loss they represent is all too real.
