Sketch
|  Even though Seth Worley’s feature debut Sketch is being released by Angel Studios, the Utah-based production and distribution company best known for its conservative, family-friendly, and often explicitly Christian-themed releases, and it bears a safe-sounding PG rating, make no mistake: This is a horror film. Is it graphically gory? No. It is utterly terrifying? Not really. Will it give small kids nightmares? Well … maybe. But, the point is, despite its overt comic rhythms and reassuring messages about the importance of family and being true to yourself, it is very much a horror film—and I mean that in the best sense. Horror as a genre often gets a bad rap for its superficiality and lack of attention to character and story depth in favor of gross-out thrills or shocks. The best horror films always connect their horrors with a deeper narrative, using monsters and the uncanny and the supernatural to dig into very pertinent, human issues, thus lending credence to the important psychological and social roles the genre can play. And that is what Sketch does best. The story centers around a father and two children who are coping with the recent loss of the their wife and mother. The widower father, Taylor (Tony Hale), is trying to keep the family together as best he knows how, which means mostly repressing the loss he feels. His two middle-school-aged children, the precocious and outspoken Jack (Kue Lawrence) and the quiet, sullen Amber (Biana Belle), deal with it in their own unique ways. Jack is constantly trying to confront the issue head-on, which leads to one of the film’s simultaneously funniest and most poignant moments when, at the dinner table, he tries to figure out what he and Amber should be called now that their mother has died (turns out the proper term is “maternal orphans,” although he first wonders if they are now “bastards”). Amber, on the other hand, unleashes all of her sadness and anger and confusion through pencils, pens, and Crayons, filling pages with ghastly doodles of monsters and bloody violence, one of which lands her in the school psychologist’s office. However, contrary to expectations, the psychologist (Nadia Benavides) does not immediately consider her some kind of threat, but rather encourages her to continue expressing her feelings through art, a welcome affirmation of the power of catharsis and the need for adults to not freak out every time a kid draws something scary.Unfortunately for Amber (and everyone else in the movie), her notebook full of scary sketches gets dropped into a magic pond behind their house that Jack had earlier discovered. The origin of this pond and the exact nature of its supernatural powers are left tantalizingly vague, which I put to Worley’s credit, as too many horror movies bend over backwards to explain everything to death. No such explanations here, as the next day Amber’s sketches coming to horrifying life and rampage through her small town. These include hundreds of clacking “eyeders,” which are spider-like creatures whose legs attach to a single eyeball; a water-tower-sized purple beasty on two spindly legs that belches glitter and whose googly eyes are always rolling in opposite directions, creating an illusion that is both funny and unsettling; and, worst of all, a long unseen dark entity that represents Amber’s deepest, saddest, angriest feelings. It is this dark doppelganger that is the most overtly horrifying, as it offers no amusing undertones or comical details; rather, it is just plain ol’ scary.Worley, who has directed a number of effects-heavy short films over the past decade, including Darker Colors (2020), which was a kind of proof-of-concept dry run for what would become Sketch, clearly knows the horror genre; he gets its rhythms and cadences and how scares can be both goosy and disturbing. But, even more importantly, he has a rich understanding of the kind of kid-centric adventure films that were so common in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, but are much harder to find now in the age of digital superhero and other mega-franchises. Sketch is the kind of film you might have seen in the mid-1980s prefaced with an Amblin logo and an “executive produced by Steven Spielberg” credit. Like those films, it offers a rich, engaging cast of characters, which also includes Liz (D’Arcy Carden), Taylor’s harried sister who is trying to sell his house (part of Taylor’s “forget the past” approach to grief), and Bowman (Kalon Cox), a sarcastic bully-turned-comrade. It also doesn’t shy away from some of life’s harder edges, especially as it relates to Amber’s struggles with channeling her sadness and Taylor’s well-meaning, but ultimately harmful attempt to shield her through denial. It is pretty heavy stuff, really, but Worley wraps it up in such a scary-entertaining package that it all clicks together.Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Angel Studios |
Overall Rating: 
(3.5)
