There’s a particular type of scene that’s familiar from any number of movies about haunted houses, haunted kids, or anything else supernaturally amiss involving a family. A concerned adult takes a peek at what a little kid has been drawing in their spare time, and instead of fun little cartoons or family portraits, they find… something else. Something disturbing, otherworldly, or darkly scribbly. Among the warning signs of demon possession or malevolent spirits in a formerly happy home, weird child drawings have to be among the top five, maybe even top three. Characters who suggest that these unnerving artworks might not be demonically inspired tend to be portrayed as in denial, and even those denials tend to downplay the artistic skill that might be involved. The touching and inventive family movie Sketch, which was quietly released into 2,000 theaters to surprising critical acclaim, addresses that trope head on, and in the process becomes a cliché-defying entry point for kid-friendly horror.
To be clear, this sweet-natured movie is not pure horror. But it does engage directly with how kids may be drawn toward horror-movie imagery based on the catharsis they offer, rather than as an unnatural, demonically-sourced abnormality. Amber (Bianca Belle) and Jack (Kue Lawrence) are elementary-school kids still reeling after their mother’s death. Their father Taylor (Tony Hale) copes primarily by not talking about his dead wife, as he takes down family photos and works with his realtor sister Liz (D’Arcy Carden) to prepare the family’s house for sale. 10-year-old Amber has always been a prolific artist, but since her mother’s death, her drawings have taken a turn for the macabre, as she sketches out gruesome monsters, sometimes enacting violent fantasies. When these drawings raise concerns at school, a counselor encourages her to keep at it, claiming they’re a healthy outlet for her anger. It’s better, the counselor says, that she exercises her frustrations with annoying classmate Bowman (Kalon Cox) on the page than getting into a real-life physical confrontation.
The lines between those worlds blur, however, when Jack discovers a pond that’s able to heal injuries, repair broken things, and, it turns out, bring Amber’s drawings to life. When Amber’s sketchbook accidentally falls into the pond, their town is soon overrun with monsters of her creation, which aren’t just misunderstood creatures who just need a friend. They’re destructive, ranging from mild mischief to genuine malevolence. Amber, Jack, and Bowman must figure out how to stop them. You might intuit that along the way, they (and especially Taylor) will learn about the dangers of bottling up grief, and the power of artistic expression.
Thematically, this material is familiar, and some of its comic moments overuse certain hacky strategies. (I lost count of how many times a character said a funny line, and another character responded, “Did you just say [funny line]?”) But writer-director Seth Worley enlivens the broadly predictable story with visual effects that cleverly reshape the horror-movie kid-drawing trope. Amber’s crude art doesn’t represent and portend more realistic threats lurking in the shadows. Instead, Worley and his team create their monsters by reproducing the usual ominous horror-movie child drawings as closely as possible. This is exactly the kind of task that talented effects artists can make work at a lower budget. Their creations don’t need to look “real” in this case, but the scuttling spiders with eyeballs for heads or the hulking orange creature with a giant gaping maw look as believable as they need to for a small-scale adventure with limited but effective locations.
The effects are believable enough, in fact, for Sketch to work as a horror-adjacent introduction to the genre; it even has a barely metaphorical treatment of grief, like so many “elevated” grown-up horror movies of recent years. Sketch’s mixture of grade-school-appropriate scares, humor that lands (young Kalen Cox is particularly funny as Bowman), and heartfelt performances lets it stand out among other family films in a summer full of diminished live-action remakes and uninspired animation. What makes this especially surprising is that such an inventive junior-level horror-fantasy comes from Angel Studios.
The company is probably best known as the distributor of 2023’s surprise theatrical hit Sound of Freedom, an action thriller aimed at people who recently became weirdly fixated on the idea of sex trafficking. But Angel Studios isn’t just an outlet for Jim Cavaziel to play action hero; it releases all manner of low-rent faith-based movies, many of them inexplicably starring Neal McDonough. Earlier this year, Angel had its second-biggest hit ever with The King of Kings, an animated adaptation of a Charles Dickens book written specifically for the author’s family, published after his death and against his wishes. It’s a retelling of the story of Jesus, so it’s not exactly highly protected IP, but it’s still an odd way into well-known material. Moreover, the movie itself is a chintzy piece of bobbleheaded animation that wasn’t even the best family film of its release month.
Angel Studios didn’t greenlight Sketch; it was a completed indie movie it picked up to distribute. Still, the film is a major step up for the company that pioneered a “pay it forward” pyramid-scheme approach to ticket sales, entreating viewers to buy more tickets after the movie is done, to be gifted to others. There’s no hint of propaganda, religious or otherwise, in Sketch, so it’s a shame that it hasn’t done as well as other, less accomplished Angel Studios titles.
The movie also connects to another, more secular family film from earlier this year. Amber does use her art to save the day, and not all of the creatures are eradicated, so the movie isn’t purely about her destroying her work. In that embrace of problem-solving through creativity, Sketch recalls the enthusiasm of A Minecraft Movie. Characters even name-check the game. The Minecraft movie was obviously great fun for its target audience, but Worley’s willingness to explore creativity as an outlet for anger, grief, and confusion makes Sketch a nifty unofficial follow-up for slightly older kids. At the same time, like a lot of this year’s biggest grown-up horror movies, it offers respite from the family-film sequel grind.
