"The House with a Clock in Its Walls": two-paragraph review

Eli Roth, who famously portrayed the baseball-bat-wielding "Bear Jew" in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," is normally known as a director of gore-filled horror movies aimed at adults, but in 2018's "The House with a Clock in Its Walls," he directs a family-friendly adaptation of a 1973 young-adult novel about a boy named Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) who loses both of his parents in a car crash and comes to live with his warlock uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) in 1955-era New Zebedee, Michigan. Jonathan has a quirky, combative neighbor named Florence Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett, with an American accent), who turns out to be a witch. Jonathan and Florence constantly trade nasty barbs, but Lewis is perceptive enough to see that the two like, possibly even love, each other. Both adults freely dote on Lewis, but the problem is the house itself: Jonathan has filled the house with clocks as a way to distract himself from a deep, subterranean ticking sound that seems to come from the house's very walls. Lewis is told the story of the ticking: the house's previous owner, Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan) and his wife Selena (Renée Elise Goldsberry) had been experimenting with dark magic, which led to the installation of the clock and to the deaths of Isaac and Selena. The story kicks into high gear when Lewis, now an aspiring wizard, foolishly uses necromancy to raise Isaac from the dead as a way of impressing Tarby Corrigan (Sunny Suljic), a popular kid at school. And eventually, the terrible purpose of the clock—which Jonathan has spent years trying to find—is revealed.

"House with a Clock" can't be considered a copycat version of the Harry Potter series given that the original young-adult novel by John Bellairs came out in 1973, well before JK Rowling's 1997 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The style and nature of the magic featured in the novel are markedly different from the wizarding feats depicted in Rowling's world. First and foremost, in Bellairs's story, there are no Muggles: magic is accessible to anyone who trains in the mystical arts. The themes in Bellairs's work are also somewhat different from those found in Rowling's stories: "House" is less about friendship and more about embracing one's inner quirkiness, for weird can be good. Jack Black and Cate Blanchett play well off each other as oddball neighbors who might be unaware they're actually in love. The Jonathan/Florence relationship turned out to be my favorite aspect of the movie. Florence has suffered her own personal tragedies, a fact that both makes her empathize with the bereaved Lewis and keeps her from being able to perform the powerful magic she used to be capable of. When Florence does eventually find her way back to power, the effect is like watching the eruption of a long-dormant volcano. Unfortunately, Florence's positive character arc comes somewhat at the expense of Jonathan's: the warlock proves mostly useless in the final fight against Isaac Izard's revenant, which is too bad given how the story hints at the power Jonathan is capable of summoning. That flaw aside, I thought "House" was a generally entertaining movie with a good message for kids. It also happens to be filled with intermittent fart, poop, and piss jokes, which I appreciated because I'm an irreparably regressed individual. (The piss jokes come packaged with an awkward-bordering-on-gross visual effect that is the inverse of the "baby-headed Death Eater" joke from the fifth Harry Potter book.) Adding to the weirdness is Sunny Suljic's uncanny resemblance to a very young Ted Cruz—an impression I couldn't shake off once the insight popped into my head. And Owen Vaccaro, as young Lewis Barnavelt, turns out to possess a superpower: the boy can emit high, piercing, girlish screams like nobody's business. While it'll be no one's idea of great cinema, "House" contains good acting, good humor, so-so CGI, and a story that is a welcome departure from the Hogwarts-style magic that can be a little tiresome after dominating theaters for a decade.