A Monster Calls: a movie and book comparison

[TeenHelp]

A Monster Calls: a movie and book comparison
By Jenna (~Abibliophobe~)

Spoiler warning: This article contains a number of spoilers.

In December 2016 the movie A Monster Calls came out in theaters. After doing some research I found out that the movie is based on a book by Patrick Ness. As someone who likes comparing and contrasting movies based on books, I decided that I would read the book and then watch the movie. I was expecting the movie and the book to be quite different but I was able to see early on that they were actually similar. There were a few things that had been changed around but I did not think that those things necessarily took away from the movie.

The story is about a boy, Conor, who ends up encountering a monster while trying to come to terms with his mother’s sickness as well as with the bullying he is subjected to at school. The content is probably triggering for grief as well as bullying but if you can get past those things or are not easily triggered I think you will end up enjoying it. The story is probably considered dark fantasy and has a really hard hitting plot.

Most of the differences in the movie were relatively small such as the fact that Conor’s homeroom teacher was a male instead of a female. Another thing that was different was the scene in the movie where Conor happens to see his grandmother watching home videos, which never happened in the book. The movie and the book also had different endings. The book ends with Conor telling his mother how much he loves her and will miss her but the movie adds an extra scene and implies that the mother had encounters with the monster when she was a little girl.

The book is only 205 pages long and so wasn’t strong on character development but I thought the movie ended up doing really well with that. The characters were easier to relate to and to feel compassion for in the movie. I was actually emotional towards the end of the movie but I did not feel all that emotional with the book. It felt like the characters fell flat. I was really surprised by the depth of character development in the movie because I've always felt that books were better with character development than movies.

The biggest difference between the movie and the book was the fact that two characters were missing completely from the movie. The first character that was missing was Ms. Kwan. In the book she is a teacher who notices that Conor is being bullied and tries to get him to admit to it. She also ends up coming to his aid when he gets into a fight with the bullies and lets the principal know what the bully was doing. She was not in the movie and the principal was the one who was aware of the bullying without needing anyone to tell her. Another character that was missing was Lily, Conor’s childhood friend. I really enjoyed Lily’s character in the book and was hoping to see her portrayed on the screen so I was sorely disappointed by her missing character. However, neither of these missing characters took away from the main theme of the story being told.

All in all I really enjoyed the book as well as the movie. If you aren’t someone who likes to read then you can definitely watch the movie and you won’t be missing much by skipping the book. I, personally, really like when movies stay close to the book they have been adapted for. I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was not too different from the book.