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Sketch

Sketch | Movie review

Seth Worley’s Sketch begins where most family fantasies end – with loss. Expanding on the ideas in his short Darker Colours, Worley crafts a film about children learning that grief doesn’t vanish when you look away; it mutates, demands form, and sometimes grows fangs. For Amber (Bianca Belle), who has recently lost her mother, that grief takes shape through her drawings – crayon-and-marker monsters that teeter between the adorable and the grotesque, brought to life by a magic pond.

These creatures are no mere metaphors; they’re emotional residue. Each one embodies a feeling Amber cannot name – her rage, her guilt, her yearning for the mother who’s gone. The cleverness of Sketch is how it makes sorrow tangible. Grief here isn’t a hazy abstraction but uncanny monsters that smash windows, chase school buses, and leave chalk dust in its wake. When the monsters rampage, it feels less like a horror set piece and more like a child’s subconscious in revolt.

Tonally, Sketch moves between absurdity and vulnerability with ease. The comedy never trivialises the sadness; it exposes its texture. As with the finest stories for older children – Coraline (2009), The BFG (2016), Monster House (2006) – Worley recognises that darkness doesn’t invade childhood; it is part of it.

Belle gives a remarkable performance as Amber. There’s an unforced truth to her mixture of fury and fragility, and her wide-eyed intensity and off-kilter delivery ground the film’s fantasy in the ordinary. Amber’s widowed father, Taylor (Tony Hale), embodies adult denial in its most recognisable form: tidying away grief as though it were clutter. His sister Liz (D’Arcy Carden) provides the film’s sharpest insight – that the child who draws her pain is not the one to fear, but the ones who suppress it. In that moment, Sketch reveals its truest idea: imagination isn’t escapism but endurance. To draw the monster is to survive it.

By the film’s end, the creatures that once terrified now seem essential – not villains, but witnesses. They remind us that healing isn’t about banishing unease but learning to live alongside it. Sketch turns grief into art and art into reckoning, proving that even our darkest emotions can glitter when given shape.

Christina Yang

Sketch is released nationwide on 24th October 2025.

Watch the trailer for Sketch here:

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