Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

by Drew 27 January 2017

Director Tim Burton has had somewhat of a return to form of late with the compelling Big Eyes in 2014 and now a return to gothic fantasy with this adaptation of Ransom Riggs' debut novel.

Jacob (Asa Butterfield) has spent his childhood enraptured by his grandfather's tall tales of his youth spent at the titular children's home. When his grandfather is attacked, Jacob sets out to find Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) to discover not only the truth behind what happened to his grandfather but also the details of his own "peculiarity".

Burton is the obvious choice to direct this film, with many of the characters (the cloth bound twins) and themes (eyes being plucked out) sharing parallels with his 1997 collection of darkly comic poems The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy. His skill of bringing gothic spectacle to life on screen along with Jane Goldman's fun screenplay gave the time-bending kids with powers tale a cohesive feel and really made me buy into the world.

All of the cast are engaging, with the children themselves providing plenty of laughs despite their powers being a little clichéd (invisible boy, fire summoning girl, etc), but it's the adults who really make this. Eva Green is on stunning form as Miss Peregrine, a pipe-smoking oddball with hints of menace, sadness and more than a touch of cabin fever, and there's a fun turn from Samuel L Jackson who camps it up as the scenery chewing bad guy. It takes longer than expected for Jacob to reach the home in the first act, which wasn't an issue. But the third act did feel a little rushed in comparison, and to be honest, even though it had a run time of just over two hours, I would have been happy with another thirty minutes just to pace it out a little better.

I hope this film finds a larger audience long term, as it was rather overlooked at the box office and as there are two more books in the series, I'd love to see more from Ransom Riggs' world realised on screen. Oh, and be warned, despite the twee sounding title this really isn't for smaller children. It's definitely in the upper end of the 12A bracket.