A Monster Calls

J. A. Bayona's A Monster Calls opened in 2016 and won the Goya Awards for Best Director and Best Film, becoming the most decorated Spanish film of that year. Adapted from Patrick Ness's 2011 novel of the same name (itself developed from an unfinished concept by the late Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it) the film completed Bayona's loose trilogy of fantasy-emotional dramas after The Orphanage (2007) and The Impossible (2012).

Twelve-year-old Conor O'Malley (Lewis MacDougall, in a remarkable debut performance) is visited at 12:07 each night by a vast yew-tree creature who climbs into his bedroom from the churchyard hill behind his house. The creature (voiced by Liam Neeson) tells Conor three stories and demands one in return, Conor's true story, the one he cannot bring himself to tell. Felicity Jones plays Conor's mother, dying of cancer in the present-day timeline; Sigourney Weaver is his austere grandmother.

The film operates simultaneously as a children's fantasy, a grief story, and a meditation on the violence required to honour someone's actual life rather than a sentimental version of it. Bayona's technical command (the yew-tree creature's effects work, the intercut animated sequences for the three tales) is one of the most accomplished examples of integration between live-action and animation in 2010s cinema. The closing twenty minutes are among the most emotionally exact endings in any contemporary fantasy film.