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THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS
Director: Eli Roth Cast: Owen Vaccaro, Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Sunny Suljic, Kyle MacLachlan, Lorenza Izzo, Renée Goldsberry, Colleen Camp MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:44 Release Date: 9/21/18 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 20, 2018 Director Eli Roth switches gears from gory horror to family-friendly horror with The House with a Clock in Its Walls. The results show that maybe it's the filmmaker, not the material, that's the central issue with his movies. There's a fine story here, about a young and lonely boy who discovers that he could become a warlock, with the help of his eccentric uncle and the uncle's slightly odd neighbor. The screenplay by Eric Kripke actually focuses on the boy's feelings of being different and the ways that these strange characters gradually form a family, founded upon how being weird makes them unique. Roth, though, seems to have his mind set on escalating the story's horror elements, while giving short shrift to its characters. There's a distinct sense of where Roth's attention lies. All of the movie's scary sequences are crafted with care, while everything involving the characters feels rushed, mismanaged, and shakily assembled. If not for the three central performances, which move comfortably between humor and the deeper level of loneliness within all of these characters, we could be forgiven for thinking that Roth simply wants to scare the hell out of a bunch of children with a movie that's more a ride than an actual piece of storytelling. The tale begins in 1955, as Lewis Baranavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is on a bus to a small town in Michigan after the deaths of his parents in a car accident. His uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) is now the boy's guardian. Jonathan is strange, to say the least—a former magician who has no clue how to raise a child. There are no rules in his home, save for forbidding access to a locked cabinet in one of the rooms. The house is stranger than its owner. In the stairwell, it has stained glass windows that move and, each day, change to suit the mood of the home (On Lewis' first day of school, it becomes a mountain climber, and when things start to look quite grim, it shows three graves with the dead body of one of the main characters in each one). One room is devoted to a group of mechanical dolls, which move and chortle without anyone turning their gears. A recliner comes to life and is like Jonathan's pet, and all sorts of other inanimate objects come to life to terrify Lewis in the night and, later, become the boy's pals. A topiary griffin in the backyard has the nasty habit of spray fecal-like leaves all over the place. The strangest item, though, is unseen. It's a clock—its ticking echoing throughout the edifice in the night—hidden somewhere in the house. Jonathan and his neighbor Mrs. Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett) have been looking for it since the uncle moved into the place, because its existence points to some dark magic performed by the house's former owner. Jonathan, obviously, isn't simply a stage magicians. He's an honest-to-goodness warlock, and his neighbor is a bona fide witch. Upon discovering the truth, Lewis, feeling excluded from his peers at school, asks his uncle to teach him real magic. The movie has three modes: whimsical fantasy, sincere character moments, and outright horror. The whimsy comes from scenes and montages of Lewis learning magic, which are mostly played for laughs (One scene, in which Jonathan pulls a star chart from a fountain and sends it in the air of the backyard, is the only attempt at generating some real wonder to the concept of magic, and naturally, the griffin expels its waste on Lewis at the end of it). The character-based moments are the ones that really work, thanks to Vaccaro, Black, and Blanchett. The child actor's performance is quite good, especially in the way Vaccaro communicates the constant misery of feeling like an outsider. Black is amusing, and there's a real sense of his isolation during a scene in which he has to answer why he didn't attend his own sister's funeral. Blanchett, whose character exchanges a lot of good-natured barbs with Jonathan, meets the difficult challenge of coming across as simultaneously wounded, mysterious, slightly cold, and warm-hearted. It's the movie's horror, though, that's the real focus. There are the usual scenes of Lewis wandering the house at night, only to meet assorted somethings that pop into frame or make a sudden, loud noise. The threat, orchestrated by the dead warlock Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan), is no less than an apocalyptic terror, helped along by visions of Lewis' dead mother (played by Lorenza Izzo) and the resurrected corpse of Isaac, whose unholy presence looks, quite disturbingly, like an actual resurrected corpse (It is, admittedly, much less eerie than a scene in which Black's head is digitally placed on a baby's body). The House with a Clock in Its Walls never feels like a whole. The disparate modes never come together, and from the haphazard way that the non-horror scenes are shot and edited, it's clear that Roth's heart is only with about a third of this narrative. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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