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   Sweet Deals September 8, 2025 at

   Not a review of the film proper, but a response to the subject matter presented.

   Young children can have big emotions, but they don’t always have the vocabulary or the clarity to express themselves clearly. And adults, well meaning as they are, tend to interpret children’s words the wrong way. Sometimes adults take children too literally, or they are afraid of a child’s big emotions because they don’t know how to handle them. Well-intentioned as they are, adults have a tendency to sugarcoat and minimize things to make them seem smaller and more manageable, while children view things as big and uncontrollable, and that emotional disconnect can make an adult’s logic sound condescending toward a child. But I’m not afraid of a crude, gory drawing or the child who drew it, because I used to do the exact same thing when I was eight years old. In order to get to the heart of the matter, you have to look past the obvious and ask the right questions.

   Amber creates monsters that kill people in cartoonishly gruesome ways. She does this because she’s angry. The counselor doesn’t ask why Amber is angry at her classmates; only whether or not she intends to hurt them. From experience, I understand that anger and revenge is a confession of pain. The reason Amber draws lots of gory pictures is because she probably thinks she can’t confront the issues causing her anger directly. She can’t call people out openly or beat them up, so drawing gory pictures and never showing them to anyone is the only outlet she has. Shortly after Dad confiscates Amber’s art supplies, Amber makes a drawing of nasty creatures called Eyeders who steal all his possessions, and in my head I interpreted this as Amber expressing resentment toward him: he took away something that mattered to her, so she created a monster that would do the same to him. If the film’s background were more developed, I’d wonder if the other monsters were inspired by things in Amber’s life, too.

   But as fun as it is fantasizing monsters that kill people you don’t like, that by itself will not solve the problems that created the anger. Anger is only the messenger that alerts us to the problem, but too many people act like the emotion itself is the problem, and that part bothers me regarding the way the characters in the movie behave. Dad is just as upset about Mom dying as his kids are, but he misapplies his stoicism by avoiding the issue, and he comes off as unintentionally clueless and callous. It’s entirely possible to grieve for a loved one and demonstrate emotional fortitude at the same time. The aunt who is trying to sell the house for reasons that aren’t fully explained cares so much about making the sale that she treats Dad as part of the problem, and she comes off as callous, too. The kids in the movie also don’t seem to take the conflict as seriously as they should, making mocking comments about it instead. After the monsters attack, Amber gets a chance to confront the girl whom she designated as the monster’s target. Amber tells her bully that she’s done a lot of things that have hurt her feelings, and her bully didn’t think that what she was doing was wrong and doesn’t apologize for any of it. Amber also confronts her brother, saying that even though he’s been trying to help her work through her anger, he was doing so in a bossy way that made Amber feel like she was the problem for being angry instead of addressing the reasons why she was angry. For a movie about feelings, it seems like the people in it have very little understanding of how others feel or how their actions may affect others. It’s almost as if something happened in the last several years that caused people to forget how to behave socially.

   One of the film’s stronger points in my opinion is about children using their own vocabulary to express ideas. In a child’s mind, a serving plate isn’t just a serving plate, and a butterfly isn’t just a butterfly. They’re symbols with meanings, and using the serving plate improperly undermines the abstract meaning of the symbol. Children pick up new words and ideas from all sorts of different places, some unexpected like HGTV shows, video games or Internet searches, and it takes a little bit of decoding to figure out what they’re really trying to say or want to say. Sometimes they say rude things but don’t think they’re being hurtful because they don’t fully understand the meanings or the context behind the words they use.

   I agree that the ending felt weak. Although the monsters come to life, they’re still not real, they’re only made from art supplies, and the children are able to defeat them by either washing them away or melting them down. They also have the idea to battle the artwork monsters by drawing pictures of cartoonish weapons to fight them off with. It’s certainly a juvenile idea that kids would come up with themselves, but it’s not emotionally satisfying to me. The Evil Amber may be only made out of crayons and crayons can be melted away, but it was Amber’s anger that created her. A drawing can be destroyed, but the monsters and the destructive feelings that created them will remain until they are confronted at the source. Sometimes you can confront the problem that’s causing the anger and resolve it. However, in the case where Amber misses her mother, nothing will bring her back, not even a magical pond. In cases like those, even when the source of the anger is identified, there is no solution, and the pain remains. This is where I would bring faith into the picture: if I was suffering from emotional pain and I couldn’t simply rationalize or intellectualize the pain away, I would sit patiently with it and appeal to G-d to heal me. Maybe I can’t solve the problem myself, maybe the problem is just my limited perspective, but the pain is still real, and He is the only one who can remove it.

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