by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00 (but the end credits $0.00)
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Tony Hale, D’Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle
Intro:
… frustrating in the most disheartening of ways, because the film itself is fantastic… but it seems like Angel Studios couldn’t even wait for the film to finish before ripping its soul out with their bare hands.
Reviewing a film like this is a tricky prospect because, in its own way, it feels like writing about two separate films that just happen to share the same title and cast/crew. The first is the debut feature film of Seth Worley, an adaptation of his 2020 short film Darker Colors, while the second is the latest product released by Angel Studios, stepping out of their faith-based comfort zone into something aimed at more general audiences. The extent to which these two aspects of the production conflict with each other is maddening, but out of respect for what Worley and co. have managed to cook up here, let’s give it its fair dues.
With its main premise to do with drawings coming to life, it’d be easy to compare this to films like Harold and the Purple Crayon, but that would be doing a disservice to just how different this film’s tone is. Rather than going full fantasy, this leans much closer to horror, whether it’s Taylor’s (Tony Hale) reaction to his daughter’s (Bianca Belle as Amber) sketchbook, or pretty much everyone’s reactions when monsters and creepy-crawlies climb out into the real world.
This fits with the core premise of Amber using her drawing as art therapy to deal with her mother’s death. Even through the childlike rendering of the monsters, from the googly-eyed Dave to the ‘new arachnophobia just dropped’ Eyeders, the camerawork by DP Megan Stacey along with Worley’s editing and Cody Fry’s Blumhouse-ready soundtrack manage to present them as things genuinely worth fearing. On a subtextual level, the drawings are renderings of a child trying to cope with the worst tragedy they could possibly go through.
The screenplay’s strongest moments are when it actively asserts that this kind of artistic expression is healthy and even necessary, whether it’s a drawing of a butterfly or a horrific creature who yearns for death, because they both share the same purpose of healing. It acknowledges the kind of young horror fandom that gravitated to staples like Slender Man and Five Nights at Freddy’s and even Wrinkles the Clown, and rather than try and sunshine-wash it away, the narrative highlights that the scary and strange have their purpose.
To quote Amber’s aunt Liz (D’Arcy Carden): “I think you should stop worrying so much about the girl who’s drawing pictures of her pain and worry a little bit more about the boys who are ignoring theirs.”
It’s all very cool and fist-raising and wholesome … and then the end credits happen. After an unfortunately accurate timer ticking down to “Something Sketchy”, an ad for a tie-in app called ‘Sketch: Monster Maker’ appears. The app uses AI to animate a user’s drawings… for free at first, but in order to get the most out of it, there are microtransactions involved…
Along with the usual arguments to do with pushing microtransactions onto a child-centric userbase, harvesting of their data, and the worrying normalisation of essentially having a computer draw over a child’s own imagination, is a move of unashamed cynicism.
If this were just attached to one of the film’s trailers or general marketing, that’d be one thing, and it wouldn’t even have to be brought up here. But to actually make it part of the film proper (because, yes, the credits are part of the film) not only betrays the celebration of organic, human creativity at the heart of the story that audiences just sat through, but makes it seem like Josh Worley made a deal with a not-so-Angelic presence to get this made in the first place. Much like the app being shilled, it leaves the feeling of an honest and personal artwork being drawn over for the sake of raw financial gain.
Sketch is frustrating in the most disheartening of ways, because the film itself is fantastic… but it seems like Angel Studios couldn’t even wait for the film to finish before ripping its soul out with their bare hands. Josh Worley and his highly-talented cast and crew (Bianca Belle and Kue Lawrence are phenomenal as the lead performers) made a horror film for kids that genuinely understands why an audience for such things exists; no amount of tone-deaf marketing can truly take that away from them. But seeing as Angel is already teeing up to make this into a franchise, viewing this film in isolation (even from its own producers) is likely to become more and more difficult as things progress.
