Katherine Paterson

(Disney Streaming, August 2021) There’s this annoying sub-strain of YA fantasy that merely plays with fantastic genre elements without committing to them. The approach is usually that the fantastical elements are meant to spring from the young protagonist’s mind, often to help deal with trauma. Such movies are not fantasy in the purest sense — they’re psychological dramas with genre decorations, and they usually end up disappointing genre fans who just want the filmmaker to commit. Bridge to Terabithia predates the recent spate of such examples (A Monster Calls, etc.) and is based on a book by Katherine Paterson that’s quite straightforward about not being genre fantasy. But seen cold, little of that matters: it’s about a boy and a girl, both misfits, coping with their alienation with a folie à deux of a fantastic land within reach. Director Gábor Csupó is not all that bad in portraying their awful circumstances, but then the film gets more and more arbitrary in its third act, killing off a character out of plotting necessity and then going for a wholly unconvincing grieving conclusion, followed by another half-hearted folie à deux meant to make us feel better about the whole thing. It’s… all a bit disappointing, as even the excursions to fantasyland are handled with so much restraint that we don’t care. Maybe Bridge to Terabithia plays better to a younger crowd — I just had the impression that I’d seen it all before, and better.