By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
After Twilight and The Hunger Games turned young adult novels into blockbuster franchises, Hollywood studios moved quickly to lock down the rights to anything that could possibly become a hit. That’s how the book Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, released in 2011, was turned into a Tim Burton movie by 2016, an impressive turnaround for a young adult gothic adventure. A perfect fit for Burton’s oddball artistic vision, the underappreciated film is, inexplicably, now in Max’s streaming top 10.
A Hidden World Free From Time
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children tosses aside the cliche YA post-apocalypse setting, and there’s a romance, but it’s not the point of the film; instead, it’s a classic movie adventure with a young boy, Jacob (Asa Butterfield), discovering a hidden world. In this case, he’s following his grandfather’s footsteps when he gets to a ruined house on a British isle and discovers the house, and all of its quirky residents, are still alive, thanks to a time bubble that has them re-living September 3, 1943. The home is a sanctuary for Peculiars, gifted children with strange powers, under the supervision of Miss Peregrine (Penny Dreadful’s Eva Green), who can both turn into a bird, and you’ll never guess which type and manipulate time.
Jacob meets the Peculiar children, including Emma (Fallout’s Ella Purnell), who can manipulate air but has to wear heavy boots or float away, Enoch, the creepy boy who can resurrect the dead, Olive, the ginger pyrokinetic, Bronwyn, a little girl with superhuman strength, and Millard, the invisible boy. As expected, it turns out Jacob is also a Peculiar, with the very specific power of being able to see the invisible monsters, The Hollows, who want to consume Peculiars to regain their lost human forms. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children tells a strange story, and it plays with familiar tropes, but it’s also one of Tim Burton’s best films in years.
Tim Burton’s Return To Form
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is filled with creative designs and scenery-chewing performances, but no one is having more fun in the film than Samuel L. Jackson as Barron, the shapeshifter leading the hunt for the Peculiars. It’s impressive how Jackson manages to overact in a Tim Burton film, but it works. Every character is essentially a rough sketch with one or two defining traits as the film devotes its run time to exploring the strange gothic world hidden in time bubbles instead of dwelling on the trauma and psychological damage of children hiding from a world that would hate and fear them.
Unlike the two Burton films that came before, Big Eyes, and after, Dumbo, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was a hit. Not enough for a sequel adapting the second book, Hollow City, to be greenlit, but a respectable $295 million against a budget of $110 million. The critical consensus of 64 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes knocks the film for being a case of style over substance, but fans would argue that’s actually a point in the film’s favor.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children started to drift away from the public consciousness almost as soon as it was released. That’s why it’s surprising to see that the film is proving to be popular enough on Max to crack the top 10 alongside Burton’s latest film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It’s not a perfect film, but for fans of Burton and old-school B-movie gothic adventures, it’s still one of the best.
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