Howdy!
Wow, now that you mention all that, even at a first glance the movie does seem to be kind of dark.
I will try to put the trailer in context. If you haven’t seen it, beware: spoilers are coming.
The movie is about this kid named Connor who has to deal with a lot of difficulties in his life. His father is distant and irresponsible, his mother is dying from cancer, he’s bullied at school, and he has no one to help him find a way to make sense of all this.
Then one night, the monster appears. This monster is a scary but benign sort of super-ancient tree spirit, and his only goal is to help Connor come to grips with his reality and ultimately achieve healing.
That might help contextualize the red flags that we see in the trailer. Connor breaks things because he’s supposed be learning not to keep his frustration bottled up. The church crumbling to pieces is part of a nightmare that Connor is having, wherein the church’s falling debris open up a gaping hole in the adjacent graveyard; Connor’s mother is swallowed by this hole, symbolizing his fear that she will die soon. And that scene with the monster in the school is the part where he teaches Connor to defend himself from the local bullies.
That being said, I think there are some un-Christian themes being smuggled in along with the life lessons. For instance, the monster clearly is some sort of spiritual being and not simply part of Connor’s imagination; Connor and his mom are the only people who can see him. However, the monster seems to have no connection to God at all. He never makes any reference to God or Jesus or any of the truths of Christianity. And, though he is portrayed as being kind and just, he seems to regard himself as the ultimate standard of all justice and wisdom. There is no one above him, or at least no one whom the monster feels he should give credit to.
What’s most unsettling is that God is given no part in this story about growth and self-discovery. God is never even referred to directly. All the healing that takes place here is based on the monster teaching Connor some rather bland bits of worldly wisdom, such as the fact that humans are complex creatures and we often carry contradictions within us. (On occasion, these bits of wisdom take a relativist turn; the monster teaches Connor that nobody is really good or evil, but something in-between, and that is just the way it is. No allusion to the need to reject evil and seek holiness; just everyone’s moral mediocrity presented as a brute fact of life.)
Things get even murkier when one examines the few occasions in which Christian belief is explicitly alluded to. As mentioned earlier, the local church is destroyed in Connor’s nightmare for no good reason (the writer could’ve had anything else happen to kill Connor’s mom; but no, the church had to come crashing down). Later on, the monster tells the tale of an Anglican priest who 1) has no qualms about preaching to influence public opinion in favor of his own prejudices, 2) unknowingly ruins the life of an innocent man by preaching against him, and 3) abandons his faith when he believes circumstances warrant it. In fact, the monster gets Connor to help him destroy the priest’s house in order to teach him to channel his aggression. So, every time that Christianity is brought under the spotlight, it is negatively represented.
Not only that; the monster himself appears to bear witness against Christianity. He is designed to look like a humanoid tree, rooted to the earth, in stark and probably deliberate contrast to the Christian aspiration for things celestial. Further, the monster explains that he is destroying the priest’s house because he means to punish him for being “a man of faith without faith.” If the monster believed in the Christian God at all, here he might’ve said, “a man of faith who turns his back on God,” or something like that. Instead, what fuels the monster’s anger is simply the priest’s hipocrisy and lack of conviction. Given the cold treatment that Christianity receives throughout the rest of the movie, I think it’s safe to assume that, as a spiritual being himself, the monster “knows” for a fact that the real God is not the God that Christians believe in. So, then, here we have some subtle signs that the monster as a character is essentially a mouthpiece for buddhist or deist or New-Agey beliefs. Maybe a blend of all three.
Lastly, I think there’s something wrong with this running theme of aggression and destruction being seen as positive and even therapeutic throughout the movie. Sure, there’s a rightful place for such things in life; Jesus resorted to aggression when He unleashed His righteous fury against the merchants who’d taken over the Temple. However, there’s a difference between that and actually breaking somebody’s windows because “it feels good” (the monster’s words) and you feel the person deserves it. A truly positive way to channel Connor’s bottled-up energy might’ve been to reach out to the broader community and to use his strength and his hands to help all the people who were even worse off than he was. Getting exhausted helping others feels good, too, but in a less self-indulgent sort of way.
In short… A Monster Calls is basically a high-budget postmodern parable teaching people how to live an acceptably happy life built on relativistic worldly insights and a pleasant, fuzzy belief that “there’s something out there” in the spiritual realm; fortunately, one can rest easy knowing that this something is completely unrelated to the prejudiced, breakable, man-made Christian Church.
And now I understand why this film was so troubling to me on an intuitive level when I first watched it. Hmm.
Anyway – I apologize for the essay, everybody. I hope somebody out there can find it useful or at least interesting. Of course, further thoughts are always welcome.
