Director: Seth Worley
Writer: Seth Worley
Stars: Tony Hale, D’Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Cox
Synopsis: When a young girl’s sketchbook falls into a strange pond, her drawings come to life—chaotic, real, and on the loose. As the town descends into chaos, her family must reunite and stop the monsters they never meant to unleash.
These days, it’s difficult to talk about a movie being distributed by Angel Studios without dedicating a great deal of focus to the fact that said movie is being distributed by Angel Studios. The company was put on the map by the surprise (and controversial) success of its 2023 hit, Sound of Freedom, a drama about rescuing victims of child sex trafficking that starred a devout, anti-abortion, pro-QAnon Catholic in Jim Caviezel, and one that instituted a pay-it-forward ticketing scam – to call it what it was – that bolstered the film’s box office numbers and ultimately saw the film’s screenings reach capacity at alarming rates. Sound of Freedom’s supporters wanted to make sure that people could see the film for free, to have them witness the magic of its messaging, even if that magic was and should still be considered dark. Since that movie’s release, Angel has quadrupled down on its mission of forcing faith-based dramas into multiplexes, most notably the animated King of Kings, in which Charles Dickens tries to recite A Christmas Carol to a London audience only to be interrupted by his son, who wishes to tell the story of Jesus Christ.
In other words, Seth Worley’s Sketch deserves better. It deserves a better home, a more inclusive one to prop up its core themes – the importance of family and imagination foremost among them – and one that doesn’t use the film’s credits as an opportunity to promote an app tie-in where fans can use AI to create their own monsters, ones inspired by the drawings that take center stage in the movie. It should be noted that Sketch premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and was acquired by Angel in April, so it’s not fundamentally a studio brainchild. But it begs a dispiriting question: When a distribution company has created so much ill will for itself on the shoulders of its core values and behaviors, and later inserts those tendencies into the final product of a perfectly fine film, why would anyone in their right mind send any good will its way, no matter how much the movie in question may deserve it?
I’d argue that Worley’s film – a family drama that fills something of a genre void in a theatrical landscape that would prefer to pretend that The Fantastic Four: First Steps fits its mold – isn’t actually worth the Angel-inflicted fuss, as while it is, indeed, perfectly fine, it’s also precisely that: Fine. Even if it imagines adolescent trauma in a far more effective fashion than most modern offerings tend to, especially those in the horror genre, there’s a surface-levelness that is unmistakably rote. Starring Tony Hale as Taylor Wyatt, a father who internalizes his grief in the aftermath of his wife’s passing to the point where his children, Amber (Bianca Belle) and Jack (Kue Lawrence), feel they’ve been left on a depressing island to fend for themselves, Sketch exists with one idea in mind: The fact that processing your emotions is a difficult but necessary task. Creatively exorcising her demons is the only way Amber knows how to cope, and when the vaguely-frightening Sesame Street-esque illustrations she scribbles into a notebook that her guidance counselor gave her begin to come to life after falling into a magical pool – Together, anyone? – it’s her job, along with her brother and the school bully/know-it-all (Kalon Cox) to navigate their now-uniquely colorful world.
As the youthful trio ventures through their town and nearby woods in an effort to outrun and outsmart the monsters of Amber’s own creation, Taylor and his sister, Liz (D’Arcy Carden) search for the kids who are theoretically supposed to be in school. The affair is spirited enough, and Worley’s scribbled creations are brought to life spectacularly; the visual effects team deserves some serious kudos, especially considering how much humanity has been poured into each design, unlike the monstrosities that appear in the film’s credits. Yet there’s something missing when it comes to Sketch’s handling of its central loss, that dances between offering unique ways to grieve and barely saying anything more than “death is strong, but love is stronger.” There’s truth to that idea, and Worley and co. have a handle on the necessary knowledge that they aren’t about to offer any revelations related to distinct heartbreak, only in how they depict it being endured. Perhaps that should be enough; in this case, it almost is. If only this critic’s cynicism wasn’t hardwired to balk whenever presented with the idea that any emotion can be made easy as long as it is felt by you and those you cherish as a whole.
