Liam Neeson's Giant Helps a Dejected Boy in New Trailer for 'A Monster Calls'
Steven Spielberg may have had little impact at the box office with this summer’s The BFG, but that doesn’t mean Hollywood has given up on entertaining sagas centered on larger-than-life creatures. This fall, we’ll get another giant-size children’s fable, albeit this time of a darker, more mournful sort, in director J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls, which has posted a new trailer (watch it above).
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Based on the award-winning book by Patrick Ness, the story focuses on a 12-year-old boy (newcomer Lewis MacDougall) coping with his mother’s (Felicity Jones) terminal illness by retreating into the fantasies he draws and writes in his spare time. Forced to contend with an uncaring grandmother (Sigourney Weaver), an MIA father (Toby Kebbell), and school bullies, he’s a dejected kid struggling to keep his head above water. To cope, he uses his pencil and paper to create an imaginary monster — and then has his world turned upside-down when that towering goliath (voiced by Liam Neeson) comes to visit him, helping him act out all the fury he feels.
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As indicated by this new preview, Bayona’s follow-up to The Impossible — and prelude to his work on the next Jurassic World movie — will again involve sequences of sweeping large-scale disaster, although obviously in a far more fanciful, fantastical style. While this latest peek gives away a good deal of the film’s plot, its mixture of supernatural terror and familial drama indicates that A Monster Calls will be tugging at the heartstrings — and, ultimately, aiming to lift spirits — when it tackles the trauma of terminal illness in a distinctly gigantic way starting on Oct. 21.
J.A. Bayona’s ‘The Impossible’: Watch the trailer:
