Almost as if it were made in response to John Krasinski’s IF, a saccharine fantasy about a motherless young girl who through magical contortions was able to interact with not only her own imaginary friend, but dozens of other cutesy creations (all voiced by the filmmaker’s celebrity friends) in what amounted to group therapy, Seth Worley’s Sketch counters with a pointed hyopothetical: what if that same kid had a really fucked up imagination instead? While still couched in the language of child psychology and that seemingly inescapable genre film trope of overcoming trauma, Sketch understands that even with well-intentioned adults trying to reassure them that their feelings are perfectly normal, the things that children think up on their own can be straight nightmare fuel; particularly as they’re not bound to any sort of logic and are often a means of working through unprocessed, deeply confusing emotions. However, what might have been waved off as “unnerving but something they’ll grow out of” when confined to the pages of a notebook takes on an entirely new meaning when it’s not only tangible, but is chasing you down the road.
Tween Amber (Bianca Belle) and her slightly older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) live with their father Taylor, played by the ever-reliable Tony Hale, with the three of them still dealing with (or not, as the case may be) the recent passing of the family’s matriarch. While Jack and Amber argue at the dinner table whether they’re considered orphans (Google helpfully explains they are, in fact, “maternal orphans”) Amber channels her anxiety and sorrow into her sketchbook — cheerfully adorned with a kitten on the front cover — where her drawings take on upsetting overtones, especially the ones that depict her bratty classmate Bowman (Kalon Cox) being stabbed through the stomach with a very sharp object and bleeding out. Every page is some ghoulish creation of Amber’s own design that feels lifted straight from the unconscious while also possessing a certain kind of deranged logic (e.g., arachnid-like creatures whose thoraxes are a giant eyeball called “eye-ders”) that dad tries to reassure her is perfectly normal while also being visibly creeped out. Meanwhile Jack, while wandering around in the woods behind the house, discovers a magical pond with glowing blue waters that has the ability to fix broken objects (the film spends exactly no time dwelling on the “hows and whys” of this plot device, so this review will do likewise). If it can make his smashed cell phone good as new and fix a cherished serving plate, what might it do to mom’s ashes, which dad has kept hidden away in a closet? But before Jack ever gets the chance to find out, Amber stumbles upon him at the water’s edge and, after some pushing and shoving, her notebook falls into the drink instead.
Soon, both the house — which the family has been unsuccessfully trying to offload with the help of Liz (D’Arcy Carden), Taylor’s sardonic sister and real estate agent — and town are overrun by sentient crayon and marker creations who, despite the googly eyes and colored-outside-the-lines shape, represent a very real threat to life and limb. The creatures are janky-looking by design, but Worley, a VFX artist and industrial video producer by trade, is smart about how he implements them, lending them real weight if not actual dimension, while leaning into the literalism of a child; how does one kill something drawn from chalk? The same way one gets a chalk drawing off the driveway, of course. Joe Dante’s Gremlins feels like a big influence, but the overarching tone here is less anarchic, live-action cartoon or creature feature and more screwball comedy. Worley’s screenplay is heavy on dialogue callbacks, plant-and-payoff plot devices, and humor that’s intrinsically connected to the film’s editing and shot composition (such niceties used to fall under baseline proficiency in mainstream comedies, while now their mere presence feels like an oasis in the desert). A school bus attack sequence (by a giant, glitter-belching blue biped named “Dave”), while suitably harrowing in its own right, also showcases a semantics debate over whether an iPod is in fact a phone, two inspired needle drops — one of which gets an appreciated callback in the film’s end credits — and a clever gag where a cowardly child escapes through an emergency hatch in the roof that’s conveyed entirely through offscreen sound effects and out of focus action in the background of the frame. It’s not revelatory stuff, but Sketch has the fundamentals down cold.
It helps that the cast, specifically the child actors, is exceptional. The film’s action splits apart Taylor and Liz and Amber and Jack (along with perpetual thorn in the side, Bowman) into parallel adventures, with much of the film’s action driven by the kids. The young actors are precocious (in the way sitcom performers often are) without being obnoxious; bouncing off one another with their bickering and pre-adolescent skepticism, taking to the film’s PG-rated barbs and volleying insults like fish to water. Meanwhile, old pros like Hale and Carden keep the film’s fantastical premise grounded in the emotionally credible, with Taylor and Liz (themselves a pair of siblings well-versed at needling one another) meeting each new creature with the right mix of horror and deadpan resignation. It’s all building toward an emotional epiphany about confronting sadness in all of its messy manifestations being a healthier response to grief than denying its existence altogether, which is fairly customary for this sort of thing (one imagines Hale perhaps felt a touch of déjà vu here, having lent his voice to Inside Out 2 earlier this year), but it’s movingly addressed all the same. The derivative nature of Sketch, which feels very mid-’80s Amblin-adjacent, limits the film’s ambitions somewhat, but there’s an audience waiting to discover and appreciate a film like this. It’s comforting in its familiarity, but in its particulars and execution, it’s better than it arguably needed to be.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 5.
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