Many gears missing in The House with a Clock in Its Walls

Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, and Jack Black in The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Among the many things amiss about The House with a Clock in Its Walls is a simple purpose. It aims to fit into a few genres, but never quite manages to find the one worth filming. Concepts of horror sneak in, but never become realized in the ways they should be. It wants to have a message, to say something powerful about the good and evil and the human soul, but the message is garbled and difficult to interpret. The House with a Clock in Its Walls is fine when its a light kids' flick, but it falters as soon as it tries to grapple complexity. That's not too surprising given the limitations of director Eli Roth, who has shown repeatedly he is incapable of handling complex material with a deft touch. Give the man a cabin and some teens to bump off gruesomely and he'll deliver a decent popcorn flick; give him the end of the world to think about and he'll miss why that matters.

Then again, The House with a Clock in Its Walls should be right in his wheelhouse, a movie with supernatural elements that doesn't require Roth to attempt to delve into complicated issues like vigilantism. The premise is simple enough, centering on 10-year-old orphan/oft irksome Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) moving in with his kooky uncle Jonathan (Jack Black). Jonathan, who spends much of his time meeting with his purple-obsessed neighbor Florence (Cate Blanchett), has a habit of keeping secrets, which are tied to the bumps in the night at the eerie house. As he struggles to adapt to his new life, Lewis also copes with the his parents' deaths and the dissolution of his friendship with cool jock Tarby Corrigan (Sunny Suljic, who looks disturbingly like Ted Cruz), along with a malevolent force coming his way.

It's with these basic areas where Roth sort of excels The House with a Clock in Its Walls. He shows a playful side with the house of magic, creating a less active version of Pee-wee's Playhouse that shows how inviting the place can be despite the inherent weirdness. He deploys the overqualified Blanchett and Black to add a smidgen of gravitas and heaps of kid-friendly humor, respectively, and he tosses in a pretty nifty magic trick that brings Lewis and Jonathan together. If The House with a Clock in Its Walls didn't stray too far from the basic story, it would be fine at least.

Writer Eric Kripke's adaptation of the eponymous book goes much, much deeper than that. It tosses in Kyle MacLachlan as the evil wizard Isaac Izard, who loses his soul to World War II. It adds in his wife Selena (Renée Elise Goldsberry), an apparently wicked witch willing to end the world for her love. Florence is also granted a sad backstory, one that is stated in passing but used as a primary character motivation. Jonathan is given a half-baked plot about his fears of parenting, which falls flat because the movie never invests in it. Lewis has an attachment to a Magic 8-Ball that is stated but never returned to until the final act. All of these should flesh out the characters, add some grounding to the fluff to make the characters matter to the audience. But they all fail, due in part to poor, inefficient storytelling on Kripke's part. A lot of the blame too belongs to Roth, who reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of emotional complexity. That a lot of the driving forces for characters are referenced in passing reflects minimal care from the filmmakers for the world they've built. Frankly, it is tremendously boring to watch a movie in which the stakes are so poorly established.

Strangely, the weakest element of the film aside from the lack of depth is a general absence of terror. Roth cut his teeth as a horror director, and he should be more than qualified to build tension despite his unaccustomed PG rating. Scares do not require an R rating to work as long as the person steering the movie knows how to invoke fear. Yet The House with a Clock in Its Walls doesn't evoke shivers or goosebumps. Instead the horror is outlandish and quite often silly, with Roth never bothering to set up the proper ambiance for what is largely a haunted house movie. The least Roth, and by extension The House with a Clock in Its Walls, can do is give the audience a scare or two in a movie that dedicates itself to the wonders of the supernatural.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 104 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

tl;dr

What Worked: Cate Blanchett, Jack Black

What Fell Short: Directing, script, ambiance, Lewis Barnavelt

What To Watch Instead: Coraline, ParaNorman, Halloweentown