A Monster Calls is a journey into loss and shame the likes of which you’ve rarely seen before. It is fantastic in terms of the production design, performances and writing. I of course particularly enjoyed the wisdom woven within the story – the dark mythical threads that stimulated the storyteller and remedial hypnotist inside me.

For starters the monster is a mythical beast who enters the modern world to assist a young boy, Conor, with grief, which is one of the most complicated emotional experiences regardless of how old you are. The monster brings with it some fairytales with which to teach Conor how to cope with a change being forced upon him in his real life.

The monster is a frightening and dark presence and does not introduce himself in any way that inspires confidence but Conor is not afraid and tells him so. The mythological theme here is that of the ego and shadow – Carl Jung’s model of personality identifies The Ego as the personality and capability choices that each of us as individuals make in our lives and The Shadow is the complete opposite of those choices. That does not necessarily make The Shadow bad – just different as can be from you – and so your shadow should not be ignored as it might have something useful to offer. This story teaches us that salvation is not always found in our positive thoughts.

For much of the film I thought that the monster was there to help Conor face his greatest fear, but it is not as simple as that. The monster represents the darker side of Conor speaking wisdom and encourages him to listen to those darker thoughts and not ignore them because ignoring them can do more harm than good. The Shadow is as much a part of any of us as our Ego and needs to be acknowledged because a single minded approach to life is not healthy. Even the monster’s stories that save Conor highlight that good people are not necessarily all good and bad people not all bad.

Looking at this story in terms of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth, I can see two hero’s journeys present – one is completed within these events where this story is only the first few stages of Conor’s much bigger hero’s journey, but so it is with life – the change we have to learn to cope with is perpetual.

Conor’s ordinary world is under threat from his mother’s illness which is his call to adventure. I feel this story is all about his refusal of the call of that particular adventure and overcoming it. Conor is blocked by his inability to accept his mother’s impending death and the monster is the mentor that he summons from his subconscious to help him through. In accepting his mother’s death he crosses the threshold and so begins his road of trials, but that is where we leave him. This is his bigger story.

The entire hero’s journey found within A monster Calls is the smaller story within the larger story. The call to adventure in this case is Conor’s grandma and his refusal of that call is his denial that he needs to live with her. The Monster is still the mentor in this story, but his crossing of the threshold in this particular journey is when he agrees to listen to the monster’s tales – he submits to an unknown world. He then embarks on his road of trials by facing a series of challenges that have already been established – with his father, school bullies and his grandma – where the relevance of the stories that the monster is telling him start to bleed through into his real life and understanding.

All of this leads him to the big ordeal with the monster who forces him to confront himself and admit what he has been hiding from and in that moment finds he stops denying the inevitable, faces the death of his life so far and is able to let his Mum go. In doing that he becomes more accepting of his grandma and new life with her. His road back is travelled with her during which they actually bond for the first time on their way to his Mum’s death bed which is his resurrection. His return with the elixir is when he moves in with his grandma and realises that it is not as bad as he thought it was going to be at the beginning of things.

The final revelations of the film are most heart-warming as well which might actually be the true elixir – it was for me anyway.