A TIM BURTON FILM THAT KEEPS YOU IN THE LOOP
Part Harry Potter, part X-Men, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children could have a hard time finding an audience. Tame by superhero standards, it nevertheless contains some disturbing images that could give younger viewers nightmares. Either that or turn them into writers or filmmakers, which might be exactly what director Tim Burton hopes.
The story opens with teenage Jacob (Asa Butterfield), receiving some mysterious information from his dying grandfather (Terence Stamp). In typical movie fashion, the old man expires after revealing enough about a mysterious island to stir Jake’s curiosity, but not enough to answer all the questions he has — or we have. For that, you’ll need to invest another two hours.
It’s a worthy journey, though a bit of a slow build at first. Jake convinces his ornithologist father — Chris O’Dowd, masking his natural Irish accent behind a terrible American one that is the worst affront to both countries since the Fenian raids — to take him to the Welsh island where his grandfather grew up. He finds the titular Home there, but in ruins, destroyed by a Luftwaffe bomb during the war. Ah, but he doesn’t know about the Loop. Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), the headmistress and guardian of the Home, has the power to enfold her abode in a perpetual 24-hour temporal Mobius strip, so that every day she and her charges wake up on the morning of Sept. 3, 1943, and every night they turn back the clock just before the incendiary device flattens the house. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, the inhabitants remember each looped day but never grow older.
Jacob finds his way into the Loop, where he develops a chaste crush on Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell), one of Miss Peregrine’s brood. Chrono-sensitive viewers will realize that Emma, though she looks to be Jacob’s age, is actually closer to 90; the film wisely ignores this weird gap, much as did the Twilight series.
Emma’s peculiarity is that she floats into the air if not held down by clanky boots. She can also blow endless air from her lungs, which probably comes in handy at birthday parties. Her housemates have a range of other abilities. Some of them — fire control, great strength, invisibility — are bona fide superpowers, lifted directly from the Fantastic Four. (Who, let’s be honest, aren’t doing much with them at the moment). Others, such as giant teeth in the back of the head, are merely bizarre.
The kids could potentially be giving the Justice League a run for their money, but Jacob soon learns that the Loops — there are many of them, scattered through time and across the world — have been set up to protect the children from nasty, eyeball-eating monsters called Hollows, and from one particular meanie, played by Samuel L. Jackson in full-on villain mode, though not allowed to curse. (Darn that PG rating!) Miss Peregrine has been adapted from the popular children’s novel by Ransom Riggs (guessing his parents were Mel Gibson fans), with a screenplay by Jane Goldman, who also worked on X-Men: Days of Future Past, and hence knows a thing or two about superheroes and causality. Its Loop-based antics do get a little muddled at times, but the overall effect is still magical. Jacob is that evergreen protagonist, the Kid Who Doesn’t Fit In. The movie strives to give him a tribe.