This is a delightful bit of family-friendly frights.
Director David Yarovesky’s modest chiller is adapted from J.A. White’s 2018 young adult novel of the same title, which is a modern — and spooky — riff on the ancient saga of Scheherazade (who, you’ll recall, kept herself alive by starting a story at the end of each of 1,001 Arabian nights, concluding it the following evening, and then starting another).
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| While exploring their captor's massive library, Alex (Winslow Fegley) and Yasmin (Lidya Jewett) find scribbled notations on the pages of one book: perhaps clues on how to escape? |
Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis’ script hews closely to White’s novel, including the stories-within-the-story element, and the essential moral: that it’s always important to be true to one’s self.
Young Alex (Winslow Fegley, remembered from last year’s Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made) has long loved scary stuff. His bedroom is a shrine to pop-culture movies and TV shows, and his doting parents (Jess Brown and Mathieu Bourassa) have cheerfully indulged this passion, even to the point of occasionally dressing up and transforming their apartment into a haunted house.
Alex — a budding Stephen King — also has written many of his own scary stories, carefully preserved in a stack of Nightbooks.
But, as the story begins, Alex has just hit a crisis. Tired of being teased at school for the unusual way he dresses, humiliated by having been tagged with the nickname Creepshow, he rashly decides to destroy his life’s work. He gathers up his Nightbooks, runs to the elevator and punches the button for the basement, intending to hurl his notebooks into the boiler room furnace.
The elevator stops elsewhere, opening onto a mysterious, spookily illuminated hallway. He’s drawn to apartment 4B; once inside, the door vanishes behind him.
This is the home of Natacha (Krysten Ritter), a sinister witch with a fondness for runway glam outfits. (Costume designer Autumn Steed had a good time.) She’s accompanied by Lenore, a creepy, hairless Sphinx cat with the ability to turn invisible. Having somehow learned of Alex’s talent for spinning terror tales, Natacha commands him to tell her a story.
She further warns that if his story isn’t scary enough, he’ll meet a dire fate … typified by the disturbingly life-like, doll-size figurines of children placed on a shelf.
And so, (fortunately) armed with his Nightbooks, Alex tells a story — “The Playground” — which we watch in animator Mary Yang’s deliberately retro, low-tech style.
The telling doesn’t unfold smoothly; Natacha keeps interrupting, editing Alex’s narrative elements, or simply insisting “That isn’t scary.” These exchanges are quite droll, thanks to Ritter’s exaggerated haughtiness and Fegley’s persuasive blend of confusion and terror.
Alex succeeds, and survives the night.
