Tim Burton gets to show off his idiosyncratic visual imagination and his affinity for misfits and outsiders with this fantasy adventure starring Eva Green
Tim Burton gets to show off his idiosyncratic visual imagination and his affinity for misfits and outsiders with this fantasy adventure starring Eva Green.
Adapted from Ransom Riggs' best-selling novel, the story is full of those grotesque and creepy elements Burton loves, but it also boasts a boggling plot.
So there is a fair amount of clanking and clunking of narrative gears before the young hero, present-day teenager Jacob (Asa Butterfield), gets to the Welsh orphanage of the title, a strange neo-Gothic pile that exists in a 1943 time loop.
Yet when the film gets going, its eccentricities prove irresistible.
Green is typically enchanting as the pipe-smoking, crossbow-wielding, shape-shifting Miss Peregrine and her strangely gifted young charges are equally eye-catching, among them Ella Purnell's lighter-than-air Emma, who wears lead shoes to stop herself floating away, while Samuel L Jackson gobbles eyeballs and chews the scenery as the story's sinister villain.
