Truly the stuff of nightmares.

Rating: 3/10 (11 December 2016)

This is a children's film. Yet it is full of the kind of monsters that haunt you at night while you writhe sweat soaked in a bad dream. The death mask like faces and cold dead eyes of the creatures in this film are soul shrivelling and yet these creatures are the children we take our journey with. Each time one of them speaks their lips peel back to reveal gnashing teeth. Their emotionless faces hold a kind of unfeeling malevolence that is fear inducing. Couple this with the fact each of them has a voice of an adult it takes you to some surreal place where everything seems somewhat sinister and unsafe.
The angular empty world this movie takes place in exists on another plain. Cold and flat and devoid of any believable life. It is somewhere I would dread to wake up in.
The elves are terrifying spindly little legs and goblin like faces. They are more like how you would imagine Rumpelstiltskin to look. Their appearance is more of something that would steal your soul than build you a toy.
Permeating this film is Tom Hanks, speaking through several of these characters like some eternal element. The big brother of this vacuum world. A puppet master using these automatons for his own ancient devices. But at the same time he is also the voice of our Hero boy. Is this some internal struggle a part of this all-seeing presence fighting against itself. I don't know. But what I do know is that at night sometimes I see the faces of these hellions in my nightmares and so will you if you view this harrowing piece of celluloid.