(2008) Director Mark Waters swears this story, based on the children's books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, is true, all true. Following separation from her husband Richard, Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) brings her three children - teenage daughter Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and younger twins, Jared and Simon (both played by Freddie Highmore) - to a "big creepy house in the middle of nowhere" where her aunt Lucinda and great uncle Arthur Spiderwick once lived 80 years ago.

Once inside the old house, Jared, angry over having had to leave his father, discovers a dumbwaiter (containing missing objects and a key) and begins to explore, finding a secret room upstairs with a trunk, which the key opens. Ignoring a warning written in the dust, "Jared Grace leave this place," the intrepid boy looks inside the trunk and removes a book, Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide, bound and sealed with a note cautioning against opening: "You'll never see things the same way again."

Within its pages he reads about magical creatures such as sprites, sylphs, brownies that when upset become boggarts, hobgoblins, and the evil shapeshifting ogre Mulgarath accompanied by Redcap the bull goblin and his band of evildoers and trolls. Using honey and crackers to appease the brownie Thimbletack (voiced by Seth Rogen), who often remarks in rhymes, Jared learns about being "safe in the circle" and using the seeing stone to make the fantastical creatures visible. Most important, Spiderwick's book must be protected from Mulgarath (Nick Nolte), who will kill them all if he gets possession.

Unaware of there being identical twins, Redcap captures the unsuspecting Simon; Hogsqueal (voiced by Martin Short), a hobgoblin who feasts on birds, comes to Jared's aid in an attempt to free his brother. Mallory fends off the goblins (who are stupid and relentless) with her sword. Unable to penetrate the circle surrounding the house, Redcap threatens the children: "You can't stay in the circle forever."

In need of help - Mom, of course, is away - Jared hopes that Arthur's daughter, now 86 years old, in the Woodhaven Sanitarium isn't really insane. He and Mallory take an underground passage, chased by a troll, to where Lucinda (Joan Plowright) greets and introduces them to flower sprites. Showing her niece and nephew the scars from a goblin's claws on her arm just before her father's disappearance, she explains that her story was interpreted as the mad ravings of a child having attempted suicide. When she hears that Jared has read her father's book, she pronounces ominously: "Then you know more than you should."

The children are in serious danger, she says: "Only one person can help you - my father … You must find him. It is your only hope." But Arthur Spiderwick would be 125 years old and certainly dead. Not quite, for the faeries transported him away to a place of enchantment to which Byron the griffin can transport them once summoned in the language of native tree elf.

In the presence of their great uncle, who looks and remembers as if he were still a man of 45, they explain who they are, having come with his Field Guide, which they implore him to destroy. That is like asking him to obliterate his own life; he praises Jared (who guiltily recalls his last hateful words to his mother) for his tenacity, exhorting him: "You are the book now."

At first Helen accuses her three children of inventing a crazy concoction as a way of expressing their desire to return to their old life back in New York City until she sees for herself through the seeing stone. Fortunately the house had been stocked with plenty of salt (a protective barrier over which goblins cannot cross) and tomato sauce (deadly upon contact with a goblin) as Mulgarath in his most monstrous manifestation and his demons undo the spell of the circle and invade the sanctity of the house.

This movie is better than both The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Golden Compass without references to Christianity, which of course opens it to allegations of being pagan, atheistic, and anti-religious.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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