It’s rare to get such a strong taste of turkey with Christmas so far off – unusual to get that piercing tang of cranberry sauce without a double-issue of the Radio Times to hand. This distinctively terrible film is a hideous hotchpotch of shouty overacting and muddled storytelling, unable to make up its mind if it’s a family drama, a supernatural chiller or a psychological mystery. It’s got plot holes the diameter of the planet Jupiter and is abjectly reliant on narrative elements which have to be initially withheld under cover of a clunking “six months later” transition, and then disclosed in laborious flashbacks assisted by the discovery of a deeply ridiculous diary accessorised with sensitive line drawings.
The director is the Spanish film-maker Sergio G Sánchez, who wrote JA Bayona’s The Orphanage and the Thai tsunami drama The Impossible. These were both substantial pieces of work, but The Secret of Marrowbone is baffling and absurd and Sánchez’s grasp of English-language idioms is uncertain to say the least. An apparently British newspaper front page refers to fifty thousand pounds as “50,000£”.
George Mackay plays Jack, an English boy who shows up with his three siblings and ailing mother in late 60s America; they are evidently in flight from the abusive dad about whom much implausibly presented stuff will be revealed later. Jack is in love with a local librarian Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is being menacingly courted by a creepy local lawyer, Porter (Kyle Soller), who suspects that something is amiss with Jack’s mother’s estate.
And all the time Jack’s family are terrified that the evil dad will somehow show up to terrorise them. But is that the dad for real, or his ghost? Who can tell? Or care?
