Miss Peregrine’s Home for Pecu­liar Children

Let’s pre­tend for a moment that Tim Bur­ton, pos­si­bly as a result of being stuck in some sort of time loop for sev­er­al decades, burst onto the scene today as a first-time film­mak­er. How would we react to some­thing like Miss Peregrine’s Home for Pecu­liar Chil­dren? And what would we make of its idio­syn­crat­ic direc­tor? Both would sure­ly stand out against the homogenised, sani­tised land­scape of con­tem­po­rary main­stream cin­e­ma. As things are, Burton’s 18^th fea­ture arrives to lit­tle fan­fare pre­sum­ably because his car­toon­ish, retro-goth­ic style no longer feels par­tic­u­lar­ly fresh. Famil­iar­i­ty does not always breed con­tempt, but in this case it gives rise to some­thing far worse: apathy.

In many ways, Bur­ton has always felt out of step with the present. Hard­ly sur­pris­ing, giv­en that his heroes are Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Har­ry­hausen and Vin­cent Price; his dis­tinc­tive per­son­al brand indebt­ed to the work of ear­ly screen pio­neers like Fritz Lang, Georges Méliès and Walt Dis­ney. By con­sis­tent­ly chan­nelling these influ­ences Bur­ton – per­haps con­scious­ly – invari­ably imbues his films with an anachro­nis­tic qual­i­ty. His lat­est, adapt­ed by Jane Gold­man from the 2011 Ran­som Rig­gs’ nov­el of the same name, is no excep­tion. It is for the most part a won­der­ful­ly inven­tive, supreme­ly weird YA fairy tale but also unavoid­ably the prod­uct of a tal­ent­ed film­mak­er stuck in a hold­ing pattern.

After an extend­ed pro­logue in present-day sub­ur­ban Flori­da, our intre­pid teenage pro­tag­o­nist Jake (Asa But­ter­field) is trans­port­ed to a remote Welsh island cir­ca World War Two where he meets some rather unusu­al orphans. Ella Purnell’s Emma is the one who first catch­es Jake’s eye, and she and Miss Pere­grine (a curi­ous­ly under­used Eva Green) lead him on a tour of the epony­mous board­ing house (think Xavier’s School for Gift­ed Young­sters, only more twee and tra­di­tion­al) while intro­duc­ing the oth­er chil­dren and their unique pecu­liar­i­ties. Their cross­bow-wield­ing, pipe-smok­ing head­mistress encour­ages Jake’s sense of adven­ture and imag­i­na­tion with talk of ​“hol­low­gasts” and ​“ymbrynes” before Samuel L Jack­son turns up and spoils the party.

Despite the unwel­come pres­ence of retro­fit­ted 3D and some pret­ty flat CGI, which com­plete­ly ruins a key stop-motion mod­el ani­ma­tion-inspired set piece, there’s a touch of old-school movie mag­ic about the way Bur­ton con­structs the film’s more fan­tas­ti­cal ele­ments. But Burton’s best since Big Fish can’t shake itself free from the con­ven­tion­al trap­pings typ­i­cal­ly imposed upon a stu­dio movie of this scale – an action-packed third act sees the direc­tor oper­at­ing way out­side of his com­fort zone. It’s clear that Bur­ton is ful­ly invest­ed in the bur­geon­ing young romance at the heart of this Peter Pan-esque sto­ry, but the long it goes on (and the film is very long, by the way) the less inti­mate and more over­stuffed it becomes.