[Week's Movie] 몬스터 콜(A Monster Calls, 2016)

 

Plot 

  13-year-old Conor O'Malley holds a close bond with his seriously ill mother, and maintains the household during her regular chemotherapy treatments at the hospital. Conor's grandmother often visits, and she suggests that Conor live with her in the event of his mother's death. Conor is reluctant to take up this offer due to her cold personality. At school, Conor is ridiculed as a daydreamer and is regularly tormented and bullied by his classmate Harry. Conor is also plagued by a nightmare in which the old church near his house collapses and falls into a hole, where someone else is in danger of plummeting and he tries to hold onto them. Conor vents his emotions via drawing, a talent he inherited from his mother. One night, exactly seven minutes past midnight, he awakes from his nightmare to see the large yew tree next to the church transform into a gnarled monster that approaches Conor's home and speaks to him. The Monster says that it will tell Conor three stories during their next meetings, after which Conor must tell the Monster a fourth tale in return.

 

  In the Monster's first story, a prince escapes from his stepmother, the supposedly-evil elderly queen, with his bride, but then kills his sleeping bride under a yew tree and makes the queen into a scapegoat so that his people can drive the queen away and make him king. As the condition of Conor's mother worsens, Conor moves in with his grandmother. Conor's father, who lives in Los Angeles with a new family, visits Conor and invites him to visit his stepfamily on Christmas, which gives Conor hope that he might live with him permanently. After Conor angrily damages his grandmother's valuable clock, the Monster appears and tells his second story: a hard-hearted parson forbids an apothecary from extracting medicine from an old yew tree, only to rescind this measure when his own children become ill. However, the apothecary cannot help him, and the Monster begins to destroy the parson's house as punishment. Conor enthusiastically joins in on the destruction, but comes to find that he has decimated his grandmother's living room. His grandmother, while bitter, does not punish Conor.

 

  Conor's mother's condition declines further, and her doctors turn to a final treatment involving yew wood. Conor learns of this and implores the Monster to heal his mother, only for the Monster to dismiss the matter as outside of his responsibility. At school, Harry proclaims to Conor that he will no longer bother Conor because he "no longer sees [him]". The Monster appears and tells a story of an invisible man who did not want to be so. With the Monster's support, Conor attacks Harry and hospitalizes him. To Conor's astonishment, the headmistress refrains from punishing Conor as she comprehends Conor's current situation. When it becomes clear that his mother will die, Conor runs to the yew tree, where the Monster forces him to relive his nightmare, in which his mother dangles for her life. Conor finally admits that he had long suspected that his mother would not survive her illness and secretly hoped that she would die soon, which fills him with guilt. The Monster tells him that he did not truly want his mother to die, but simply to end his own suffering. Conor's grandmother finds him asleep under the yew tree and drives him to the hospital, during which Conor reconciles with her. At the hospital, Conor embraces his mother one last time and as she is passing she glances at the Monster, as if she was acknowledging its existence. She dies at seven minutes past midnight. Conor returns to his grandmother's house, where his mother's old room is refurbished for him. In the room, he finds his mother's old art book, which depicts the stories that were told to him by the Monster, and a drawing of his mother as a child with the Monster.