Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Film Review by Joseph Walsh | 30 Sep 2016
Film title: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O'Dowd, Allison Janney, Rupert Everett, Terence Stamp, Ella Purnell, Judi Dench, Samuel L. Jackson.
Release date: 29 Sep
Certificate: 12A

Following 2014’s Big Eyes, Tim Burton returns to the director’s chair with an adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ creepy time travel tale, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Tim Burton's latest centres on a young Florida-born boy, Jacob (Asa Butterfield), who, following the strange events of his grandfather’s murder, travels to a remote island off the coast of Wales to find the orphanage his grandfather grew up in in the early 1940s. At the home he finds an odd bunch of inhabitants, ranging from a boy who can craft golems out of china dolls, an invisible boy fond of running around in the buff and a girl so light she must strap lead weights to her shoes. If you're thinking it all sounds like a gothic X-Men, you're on the right track.

These gifted children exist within a loop in time, living the same day over and over again in the 1940s, guarded by the stern presence of Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), a shape-shifting Marry Poppins-like time lord tasked with protecting her peculiar wards.

This is all right in Burton's wheelhouse. Based on Ransom Riggs' much-loved YA novel of the same name, the material allows the director's well-worn ultra-gothic style to flow freely, indulging his love of old horror movies and stop-motion, showing clear signs of influence from Ray Harryhausen. There are also flourishes reminiscent of his modern-day fairy tale Big Fish and the dramatic palette contrast of Edward Scissorhands, making you feel that all that's going to happen has happened once before in a previous feature.

The idyllic world of the children comes under threat from a 'hollowgast' called Mr Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) – a member of an evil race of peculiars who want to eat the eyeballs of the children in their pursuit of eternal life. Suffice it to say, this isn’t a film for children of a nervous disposition.

As ever with Burton, everything is in the detail, and the world he crafts is obsessively designed and immersive, but this comes at a price. Despite having Kick-Ass writer Jane Goldman to guide the way, much of Riggs' novel's plot is lost. The result is a film that's little more than a carnival of oddities, and as we have come to expect from Burton in recent years, a further example of style over substance. Fans of his work, however, will no doubt still be delighted.


Released by 20th Century Fox