Have a Daily Scream for your daily-streaming recommendation for spooky season! (Explore last year’s Daily Scream films.)
How’s this for scary: Life is untidy and unfair. Love can be painful, and we all exist at the mercy of time and fate. Fantasy verges into horror in 2016’s A Monster Calls, in which a 12-year-old boy (Lewis MacDougall) copes with bullies at school, abandonment by his parents, and the total upheaval of his entire life via a nightmarish relationship with a monster (the voice of Liam Neeson) who may or may not be a manifestation of the boy’s own fertile artistic imagination.
Director J.A. Bayona most recent film, last year’s harrowing Society of the Snow, shares A Monster Calls’ aching confrontations with grief and death. Here he also dares to confront an emotional reality that many adults would rather ignore: the anger of children. But he renders terror and fear as cathartic in ways that few movies deemed more overtly “horror” manage. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking movie, featuring no heroes or villains and no happy ending, just hard truths about life and human nature. And it’s absolutely wonderful and essential.
US: stream on Prime; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Prime; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See A Monster Calls at Letterboxd for more viewing options, including in all other global regions.
