‘The House with a Clock in Its Walls’ Is a Charmingly Low-Key Witch’s Tale

You’ve got to feel for anyone trying to bring any kind of story about witches and warlocks into the marketplace in 2018, now that J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World has sprouted from Harry Potter and is taking over all mediums. You’ve got to feel especially bad for a story that pre-dates the Harry Potter books by several decades and which now has to fight to break out of their shadow.

Such is the case with The House with a Clock in Its Walls, a movie based on a book from the 1970s — written by John Bellairs with illustrations by Edward Gorey — that now feels like it’s playing catch-up. One point in its favor, you’d think, would be director Eli Roth, famous for the Hostel movies and other various feats of cinema gore. The odd fit of horror maven Roth and a gothic children’s adventure seemed to promise either disaster or something singularly wonderful, and while the result actually ends up somewhere in the middle, there’s a charm and a likeability to this story that’s tough to deny.

Young Lewis Barnavelt is a sweet, lonely kid who’s recently been orphaned (no scar on his forehead, at least) and is now going to live with his uncle Jonathan, who he barely knows. Jonathan is played by Jack Black, with all the panache but about a third of the manic energy that you might expect. The fact that Jonathan is a warlock and that the house he inhabits is, for all intents and purposes, alive is a secret that doesn’t stay hidden for very long, thankfully. Lewis actually gets up to speed on 90% of what’s going on around him pretty quickly, which is refreshing and which helps the movie get on with its business.

 Stories like The House with a Clock in Its Walls live and die by how they populate their worlds with little tchotchkes and affectations. Not to bring up Harry Potter again, but the thing about Hogwarts wasn’t that it was so grand and important (though it was). It was the moving staircases and the talking portraits and the ghosts floating about and the secret rooms with wizards chess and giant, three-headed dogs. The titular house in this movie does indeed have a mysterious clock in its walls, a macguffin that, once its revealed loses much of its interest. What it could have used was a moving staircase or two.

But what keeps The House with a Clock in Its Walls moving and worthwhile is its cast, particularly the teaming of Black with Cate Blanchett, who plays Jonathan’s loyal friend and next-door neighbor, Florence. Their friendship — comprised as it is of a string of insults and exasperations — gave off the air of a couple of old, bitchy queens sniping at each other, and it was honestly a bit of a kick.

Once the plot kicks in, there’s refreshing forward momentum, and young Lewis makes for a great little protagonist. We get some deliciously brief performances from Kyle McLachlan and Renee Elise Goldsberry along the way (we also get one CGI visual of Jack Black that I don’t want to spoil, except to say that it will haunt your waking nightmares for the rest of your days), and even if the theme of family is not exactly a stranger to this genre, it fits this movie quite well. There’s a sentimental streak in this movie that feels genuine and earned, and it’s weird that it’s coming from Eli Roth, but just go with it.

Where to stream The House with a Clock in Its Walls