The House with a Clock in Its Walls

Eli Roth has made his name mak­ing puerile films for adults – the sick Evil Dead riff­ing of his debut Cab­in Fever, the touris­tic tor­ture porn of Hos­tel and its sequel, the can­ni­bal­is­ing of Ital­ian anthro­po­log­i­cal schlock in The Green Infer­no, the iffy remakes Knock Knock and Death Wish. With his lat­est, Roth revers­es time, not just going back to the 1950s, but essay­ing adult genre for kids.

Adapt­ed from John Bel­lairs’ 1973 nov­el by screen­writer Eric Krip­ke, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is both a com­ic com­ing-of-age fan­ta­sy and an effects-heavy, Har­ry Pot­ter-fied ver­sion of hor­ror, includ­ing a haunt­ed house, grave­yard necro­man­cy, creepy dolls, mon­strous top­i­ary, an ancient demon, aggres­sive jack‑o’-lanterns and even the use of axes and chain­saws. In oth­er words, this may be a children’s film, but it is also, like Fred Dekker’s The Mon­ster Squad, Gil Kenan’s Mon­ster House and Joe Dante’s The Hole, a gate­way to hard­er stuff.

After his par­ents are killed in a car acci­dent, 10-year-old Lewis Bar­navelt (Owen Vac­caro) moves into the goth­ic old house of his uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) in New Zebedee, Michi­gan. Dressed in a kimono, play­ing the sax and per­mis­sive to a fault, Jonathan is a man out of step with his times – hip in a decade where almost every­one was a square. Like­wise, his neigh­bour and best friend Flo­rence Zim­mer­man (Cate Blanchett) is an eccen­tric – edu­cat­ed, inde­pen­dent, and shar­ing not just her free spir­it but her sur­name with Bob Dylan (né Zimmerman).

Mean­while, with his gog­gles, his dis­in­ter­est in sport and his love of words, Lewis is ​‘weird’ him­self – a nerd of the kind ostracised in the ​’50s, but entire­ly nor­malised in today’s Age of Geek. These three mis­fits, who have all lost their tra­di­tion­al fam­i­lies, form a new uncon­ven­tion­al fam­i­ly togeth­er – and their out­sider sta­tus is marked by their prac­tice of mag­ic, with Lewis play­ing sorcerer’s appren­tice to Jonathon’s war­lock and Florence’s witch.

If these three seem ahead of their times, their adver­saries – the late own­er of the house Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLach­lan) and his wife Sele­na (Renée Elise Golds­ber­ry) – want to turn the clocks back, using an infer­nal time­piece con­cealed with­in the house to reset the world to an era before there were any humans. Their wicked plot is a kind of retroac­tive abor­tion: an extreme mea­sure to go back to the inno­cent, Edenic state when no bad things have hap­pened yet, but which also involves the apoc­a­lyp­tic end of everyone.

Of course, Lewis and Flo­rence too want to return to the loved ones that they have lost. But the film, though set in a care­ful­ly recon­struct­ed mid-20^th cen­tu­ry and also fea­tur­ing flash­backs to World War Two and ear­li­er, places care­ful lim­its on its own nos­tal­gic urges, and finds ways for Jonathan, Flo­rence and Lewis in the end to ​“say good­bye” to their past and move on to con­struct a new shared future. Along the way, there are plen­ty of pooh jokes to remind us that child­hood nev­er quite van­ish­es – and Black and Blanchett make for mag­i­cal spar­ring partners.