Overly literal fairy tale Spellbound makes parents into monsters

Not all magic works as it should, and not all fairy tales have tidy endings. Families aren’t much different. While not the most consistently enchanting film, Skydance Animation’s Netflix offering Spellbound attempts to bring magic and family together in order to conjure a story about healing that fits our current moment.

It is Princess Ellian’s (Rachel Ziegler) 15th birthday. Though she should be out celebrating with her friends, she’s stuck inside the Lumbrian castle, gently parenting the king and queen (Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman), who were turned into monsters by a dark curse. With the help of her royal advisors (Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow), she’s been keeping everything secret for over a year, but now things look dire. 

She has just one hope left: The Oracles (Nathan Lane and Titus Burgess). Yet despite her pleas for them to use their magic key fob to change back her parents, this is not a curse that can be easily undone. She and her parents must make the treacherous journey through The Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness and baptize themselves anew in the Lake of Light before the curse becomes permanent.

Though Lauren Hynek, Elizabeth Martin, and Julia Miranda’s script is literal to the point of redundancy—a dark forest that feeds off dark feelings—the design within Spellbound is a bubbling cauldron of chimeric elements. In this bright, twinkling, pastel world, everything is mashed with something else: cat and bird, deer and horse, frog and Uber. Yet, this interplay of being has little bearing on the story, which is focused solely on light vs. darkness. The binary story and tangled ecosystem never complement each other. The​​ disparate elements of a self-serious, straightforward plot and maximalist creature design keep Spellbound feeling kiddywampus, teetering between cloyingly obvious sincerity and confusing complexity.

It should come as no surprise, however, that Spellbound’s queer elements are best at straddling the world and the story. Lane and Burgess rise to the occasion as Luno and Sonny, Oracles of the Moon and Sun—gay uncles to the universe. The film is brightest when Lane and Burgess break into song to help Ellian deal with her dark feelings by “finding the light.” Songwriters Alan Menken and Glenn Slater try to include winking elements in all of their numbers, but The Oracles’ tune is the most magical. Lane and Burgess’ voices pair perfectly, and theirs are the only characters that seem acclimated to the outrageous world of the film, planting little beacons of irreverence in a sea of sentimentality. When they leave Spellbound, a light goes with them.

The other delight of Spellbound comes from a character who is less adjusted to the mixed-up realities of the kingdom. As the head of communications for the palace, John Lithgow’s Bolinar has promised to do whatever it takes to help his “benevolent coup” come true. But in the confusion of the film’s magical beings and sentient fabrics, Bolinar gets transferred into the body of Ellian’s purple pet rodent, Flink. The result is classic body-cross comedy, with Lithgow delivering one surly quip after another, complaining about the ridiculousness of the world in the audience’s stead.

Because, yes, w​​hen Oscar-winners like Bardem and Kidman voice babbling monsters that are somewhere between pets and children, the world feels weird. When King Solon and Queen Ellsmere were humans, they would argue so much that it caused a dark cloud to transform them into monsters. When the story opens, they can only hiss and growl. But as their journey with Ellian goes on, the trio slowly relearns to be a family as the King and Queen regain their consciousness—their “light”—like children learning to speak. Ellian has to spend most of Spellbound keeping a close eye on her parents, teaching them how to properly engage with the world around them. That sometimes words can hurt, and that actions have repercussions. Often caught between them, Ellian’s circumstances will feel familiar to any child of divorce or toxic parents.

All any child wants is to be believed, to hear their parents admit their humanity and say, “you’re right.” Spellbound aims its magical fob at these basic desires with a post-millennial perspective emphasizing self-healing and actualization over a sense of familial duty. The nuclear family is still restored but in a slightly less traditional way. Things can’t return to how they were, even after the curse is reversed. The trouble is these mature messages are lost in filmmaker Vicky Jenson’s overly literal magical world that can’t separate metaphor from reality.

Yet Jenson is right to attempt these ideas and take us on a journey from “my parents are monsters” to “these monsters are my parents.” It doesn’t take a wizard to see how that might cast an appealing spell. Culturally, we have spent the last decade or so filling our fantasies with antihero origin stories that reveal the humanity of a maligned figure. In that time, we’ve come to hope the same for our families. Films like Spellbound are extensions of that wish. They grant us a fleeting, if messy, moment of hope that behind a sometimes monstrous exterior is a complex person capable of empathizing with us.

Director: Vicky Jenson
Writer: Lauren Hynek, Elizabeth Martin, Julia Miranda
Starring: Rachel Zegler, John Lithgow, Jenifer Lewis, Tituss Burgess, Nathan Lane, Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman
Release Date: November 22, 2024 (Netflix)