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Featurette: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Watch Director Tim Burton take us inside the peculiar world of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
★★★½
Tim Burton is one of those filmmakers cursed by success. Since the days of Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, his whimsical Gothic style has become so influential it's easy to take him for granted – but his later movies are often bolder than his detractors would have you believe.
Based on a bestselling young adult novel by Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is Burton's most mainstream project in years – his version of Harry Potter.Yet, it's also in tune with Burton's own obsessions, harking back in particular to his 1997 picture book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, starring an ensemble of magical weirdos whose special powers were more like afflictions.
The same is true of the "peculiar" children living with their guardian Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, in her element) in a secluded Welsh orphanage. Each might have sprung from one of Burton's scratchy cartoons: there's a boy (Milo Parker) with a swarm of bees inside him, and a little girl (Raffiella Chapman) with a jagged, ravenous mouth at the back of her head. Another boy (Hayden Keeler-Stone) shoots light from his eyes, enabling him to project movies of his dreams.
As for the elegant Miss Peregrine, her chief "peculiarity" is an ability to manipulate time. She and her charges are enclosed in a Groundhog Day-style loop, endlessly reliving the past 24 hours before the orphanage was bombed during World War II. For Burton this space between life and death is a kind of paradise, which is also how it seems to Jake (Asa Butterfield), a misfit American teenager who strays into the realm of "peculiars".
What gives the scenario a kick is Burton's love of the morbid for its own sake. The outsiders who populate his films are not necessarily nice people: some are downright monstrous. Miss Peregrine is relatively sweet-tempered, but not without a sinister side: to preserve her secrets, she routinely murders policemen (offscreen), living as she does in a world where actions have no permanent consequences.
Unlike conventional superheroes, the "peculiars" don't use their powers for the good of humanity. They just want to be kept safe from their enemies, specifically the hollowgasts, a brood of long-limbed humanoid monsters who like to snack on eyeballs, led by Mr Barron (Samuel L. Jackson), a shapeshifting mad scientist.
Miss Peregrine is at its best in the deliberately paced first half, following Jake as he gets to know the "peculiars" and comes to accept he might be one himself. Much of the pleasure is visual, with Burton still among the few directors with a sense of how to use 3D: the shadowy deep-focus compositions have a cartoonist's economy, every detail either reinforcing the mood or standing out for its incongruity.
The entrancement fades once the plot takes over, forcing us to sit through a lot of explanations about the history of "peculiar" culture and how the time-loop system works. This kind of elaborate yet paper-thin mythology is the plague of current young adult fantasy movies, and seems even less relevant here than usual, since Burton's films have little to do with rational sense. What sticks in the mind are the singular, surreal images: a girl (Ella Purnell) rising into the air so Jake can fly her like a kite, or the children in their gas masks beneath a dark sky, looking up at German bombers while they wait for time to be thrown into reverse.