A monster comes to see me - Face reality

Fear can be understood as a factor that threatens the extreme life of an individual and limits him to spend his daily life under the anger, denial or even rejection of those around him. When you are a child, the perspective of the world is associated with fiction, we know another facet of the world where everything is censored and modified to save suffering but ... What happens when you are in the middle of the road? In this case, when you are not a child but not an adult and you are only present, you do not count for anyone but yourself.

Reality and Fiction

The first moment you listen to the title, you think that the movie may be something like "My friend the Giant" or another childish fantasy rooted in marketing a best friend who trolls the neighborhood and helps a tormented child. Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) adapts the book by Patrick Ness and transforms what could be a story about loneliness and desolation into much more, in a space dedicated to the harsh reality and having to learn lessons from the imaginary.

Connor ( Lewis MacDougall ) is a 12-year-old boy who lives apart from his parents' separation, his mother ( Felicity Jones ) suffers from cancer and is in the last stage of his treatment while his father lives in the United States. The child lives constantly isolated, attracts the attention of the bullies of the school to receive a beating and perceives his days as something ephemeral, unimportant, because nothing counts, everything does not matter.

In the midst of the circumstances in which his mother finds herself and the outlines of a sketch in her drawing book, a magical creature appears before him, an old oak tree that warns him that she has come to him to learn a lesson. So far we could believe that the Groot Transformer will teach us about life and even though it is like this, not everything is as literal as it seems.

Fragmented stories

As the film progresses, the tree appears at a certain time before Connor and reiterates that it will tell him 3 particular stories. Each of these stories has an intention according to their characters and a value that will be reflected in the life of the protagonist (not spoilers). The smart thing is how these stories are recreated in an alternate way by an unconventional animation that captivates the viewer and reinterprets its modality.

A Monster Calls goes beyond family relationships or fear that can be associated with the darkness by a child, speaks of those ideas that a child does not express in the midst of a family conflict, of the desire to destroy everything that can be felt and of each one of those behaviors that can have the same to attract attention, because although presents that it does not count in the world wants to attract attention, it wants to have the notion that it counts for something, even if it is for a blow of its worst enemy .

The details, photography and references within the small universe that builds the story are memorable, Bayona does an incredible job that justifies the Goya, if they are looking for a good movie, this could be an option to consider without a doubt.