A Monster Calls

A great sinkhole opens beneath a cemetery, swallowing not only the graves in it but the small church that presides over it like an impotent sentry. The hole also threatens to engulf a boy, Conor O’Malley, and the mother to whom he desperately clings. As their grip on one another loosens, he awakes. Then the real nightmare begins.

Conor is coping—barely—with problems that could cripple the strongest hero. His parents are divorced. His mom is in and out of the hospital in a vain effort to slow the advance of a disease that is killing her. Bullies at school torment and beat him. The opening narration describes Conor as “too old to be a kid, [and] too young to be a man.” He is too proud to cry for help anywhere but in his dreams. Then the yew tree his mother loves comes alive and visits him. The “monster” promises to tell him three stories, after which Conor must reciprocate by speaking his own nightmare aloud.

Lewis MacDougall perfectly portrays the childhood mix of unimaginable bravery and desperate, panicked weakness. The film (rated PG-13 for thematic content and some scary images) also scores high marks for not making every adult in a kid’s story an idiot. Conor’s mom (Felicity Jones), grandmother (Sigourney Weaver), and dad (Toby Kebbell) struggle to do what is best for the boy while processing their own grief.

Might some Christians read the story as being anti-faith? After all, the church is swallowed whole in Conor’s nightmare, suggesting it is powerless to help him in his pain. And the monster says that humans embrace “comforting lies” while never forgetting the “painful truths” that make those lies necessary.

Ultimately, A Monster Calls challenges rather than denies faith. The film suggests a materialist culture should not be too smug in its assumptions about what is real or true. The point of the stories, the monster reminds us, was to “save” Conor, not merely to numb his pain.