That director Eli Roth, he of “Cabin Fever,” the “Hostel” movies and the coiner of the term “torture porn” is making a film about a warlock and a haunted house should come as no surprise. That it is a spooky PG rated movie for kids is. Based on the children’s classic “The House With A Clock In Its Walls” by John Bellairs with illustrations by Edward Gorey, the film stars Jack Black and Cate Blanchett.
The movie begins with 10-year-old Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) losing his parents. Sent to live with his eccentric Uncle Jonathan (Jack Black), a wizard who lives in a rambling old house—the locals call it the “slaughter house”—with a mysterious tick-tocking heart. “There’s a clock in the walls,” he says. “We don’t know what it does, except… something horrible.” It’s a place of wonder and magic, complete with tentacle monsters—“He’s safe as long as he’s fed,” Jonathan assures the youngster—and deadly secrets. “It’s scary,” says Lewis. “I see things out of the corner of my eye and I think Uncle Jonathan is hiding something from me.”
Next door is witch Florence Zimmerman (Blanchett), a friendly face and substitute mother figure for young Lewis. Stumbling into this world of magic Lewis unleashes holy heck when he accidentally awakens Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan), Jonathan’s former best friend and warlock, from the dead. The trio must stop Isaac from locating the sourcing of the house’s mysterious doomsday clock, whose tick-tock is a threat to all of humankind, but the onus is on the preteen. “I can give you the right books, teach you the right spells,” says Jonathan, “but that last 1%, that’s up to you.”
“The House With A Clock In Its Walls” is a fantasy-based thriller with gothic flourishes for kids raised on the “Goosebumps” books. Imagine a mix of “The Addams Family” and “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” and you’ll get the idea. For the most part it is harmless Halloween fun, more spooky than scary, although Isaac’s reanimation scene, complete with white, rotting flesh and stray maggots and the barfing pumpkins may inspire nightmares for the younger set.
Roth pays attention to the details—the set decoration and costumes are terrific—but draws out the action in the first half of the movie. Black and Blanchett chew the scenery and are clearly having fun but the tick-tocking clock seems to be running extra slow in the movie’s set-up scenes.
Once “The House With A Clock In Its Walls” kicks in, it’s good, silly fun, a throwback to the goodtime horror films of 1980s Amblin flicks.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos makes idiosyncratic films. From the bizarre home schooling fantasy “Dogtooth” to “The Lobster,” a film about turning lovesick divorcees into wildlife, he is unafraid to let his freak flag fly. His newest film, “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer” starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, may be his most unapologetically odd film yet.
Farrell is Steven Murphy, an uptight cardiac surgeon married to ophthalmologist Anna (Kidman). Their two kids, Bob (Sunny Suljic) and Kim (Raffey Cassidy) are polite, happy kids. They eat dinner together every night and by all outward appearances lead a disciplined, quiet suburban life. It wasn’t always that way. Just three years before Steven was forced to stop drinking when it began to interfere with his work.
Now all is calm. The only strange thing is Steven’s attachment to Martin (Barry Keoghan), the son of a patient who died unexpectedly. Steven buys him expensive presents and always seems to have time to talk to the boy or take him out for lunch. Shortly after Martin is invited over for dinner, however, things in the Murphy household take a turn for the worse. Little Bob’s legs give out and soon he is paralyzed from the waist down. He’s given every test known to man and science but no diagnosis is forthcoming. Then Kim takes ill, collapsing at choir practice. Again, there doesn’t seem to be a medical reason for her paralysis.
There’s more, but there will be no spoilers here. If you want clues look up the Greek myth of Artemis’s demand of atonement from Agamemnon after he killed a sacred deer.
From this point on “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer” becomes a horror film about ideas rather than actions. It’s a study of extreme consequences, atonement and the length to which people will go to save their families. In many ways it’s the kind of story we’ve seen many times before but Lanthimos has filtered the domestic drama through his lens, creating an unsettling and absurd film that is as gripping as it is strange.
Lanthimos uses language and tone to bring us into his world. The actors have a eerie, mannered way of speaking as though they are always reading aloud from an Emily Post book. Before anything odd happens the matter-of-fact speech, often about the most trivial or, sometimes, inappropriate things, establishes the film’s otherworldly tone. It hangs heavy over every second of the movie and when the character’s veneers begin to crack it is even more disquieting.
“The Killing Of A Sacred Deer” does not offer explanations or apologies for anyone’s behaviour. Instead it is content to wallow in the cruelty and depravity of its story. Strange days indeed.
