The Spiderwick Chronicles

Family Fantasy

• Written by: Karey Kirkpatrick, David Berenbaum, and John Sayles, from the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
• Directed by Mark Waters

Basically a horror movie for pre-teens (and all ages above), The Spiderwick Chronicles hits almost every note right. It starts off with a family in crisis–a nice, normal crisis of the sort that everyone gets over eventually. Except this crisis has forced them to move into a large, mysterious, deserted, and creepy house with a strange history. Yup. It’s haunted. Not to worry. The real scary monsters are on the outside trying to get in.

You see, Dad deserted Mom (Mary-Louise Parker), so she packed up her daughter (Sarah Bolger) and identical twin sons (Freddie Highmore–the real star) and moved to the house where her great uncle (David Strathairn) disappeared 80 years ago. There, one of the twins discovers a hidden room and an old book, and…

I don’t want to spoil the fun. I’ll just say that director Mark Waters and his team of writers (including John Sayles) walk a very fine line between a family-friendly PG rating and some very scary stuff. The picture is short and fast-paced, and the thrills almost never let up.

That’s fortunate, because when they do let up, the picture tends towards the gooey, especially when Strathairn and Joan Plowright are on screen. Plowright, by the way, plays his daughter, and yes, the age discrepancy makes sense.

Of course it’s heavy on special effects, with computer-generated characters both scary and funny. Of course the effects by Tippett Studio and Industrial Light and Magic are technically excellent; that’s to be expected. Far more important is the fact that they’re lovely to look at and help tell the story.

Unlike most special-effect heavy fantasies, there’s no epic sense of fate or the clash of magical kingdoms, here. Centering on a family in a house, The Spiderwick Chronicles is chamber piece fantasy, not a Tolkienesque symphony. As characters, the children are well drawn, but their personalities are there simply to serve the plot.

And they serve it well. A good movie for the family that likes to be scared together.