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****
Dir: J.A Bayona (12A, 108 mins)
Patrick Ness’s brilliant novel about grief makes it to the big screen fairly intact, offering up some brutal human truths amidst the fantasy. Lewis MacDougall plays Conor, a boy on the verge of adulthood who is tortured by terrible dreams as his mother, Felicity Jones, battles cancer. As her condition worsens, the monster he envisages in his dreams and drawings comes to visit him, made from a yew tree, it’s terrifying and voiced by hard man Liam Neeson. The tree says to him it will tell him three tales and that Conor will eventually tell him his own story. These stories are told in wondrous form, fairytales with inexplicable endings about life’s hardest lessons. Bayona keeps control of the powerful material without launching into sentiment, MacDougall is excellent as the rage fuelled boy but tears will most definitely be shed at the film’s climax.
Opens Jan 1