Review: The Book of Henry (12A)

Director Colin Trevorrow's eagerly-anticipated follow-up to dino-blockbuster Jurassic World is a different lumbering beast. A clumsy mix of rites-of-passage drama, terminal illness weepie and revenge thriller, The Book Of Henry is about a precocious savant, who conceives the perfect murder of an abusive neighbour, then asks his mother and little brother to carry out the plan when a brain tumour renders him incapable.
FAMILY TIES:  Jacob Tremblay, Jaeden Lieberher and Naomi Watts.   PICTURE: PA Photo/Alison Cohen Rosa/Focus Features LLC.FAMILY TIES:  Jacob Tremblay, Jaeden Lieberher and Naomi Watts.   PICTURE: PA Photo/Alison Cohen Rosa/Focus Features LLC.
FAMILY TIES: Jacob Tremblay, Jaeden Lieberher and Naomi Watts. PICTURE: PA Photo/Alison Cohen Rosa/Focus Features LLC.

A deeply moving first half sketches family dynamics with flecks of humour, underscored with scintillating performances from Naomi Watts and Jacob Tremblay, child star of Room.

14-year-old Jaeden Lieberher, who scene-stole the 2014 comedy St Vincent from Watts and Bill Murray, commits a similar act of thievery here in the demanding title role.

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Screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz quickly exhausts our cache of goodwill by demanding gargantuan suspensions of disbelief in the second half as Watts’ suburban mother hen metamorphoses into an avenging assassin with a sniper’s rifle and carries out her boy’s plan by following a tape recording that Henry prepared in advance. The Book Of Henry is held together – just – by the lead trio, who anchor their characters in heart-breaking reality and Sarah Silverman offers spunky comic relief as Watts’ co-worker.

On general release

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