Film Review - Sketch
Images courtesy of Rialto Distribution.
Seth Worley’s Sketch is a family fantasy with teeth - playful, chaotic, and surprisingly sincere beneath its bubblegum punk rock aesthetic. Though the premise might seem familiar to anyone who's paid attention to the landscape of kid-centric cinema of late (Harold and the Purple Crayon and last year’s Ryan Reynolds-led stinker IF come to mind), but Worley’s take has the spark that makes it worth bringing the little ones along for.
Part creature feature and part emotional excavation, Sketch follows ten‑year‑old Amber Wyatt (Bianca Belle), still reeling from her mother’s death, her overflowing emotions spilling into a battered sketchbook full of strange, funny, and slightly unsettling drawings. When the book takes an accidental plunge into a mysterious pond, Amber’s creations begin to leap off the page and wreak havoc in her small suburban town. Joined by her brother Jack (Kue Lawrence), and their dad (Tony Hale), along with Aunt Liz (D’Arcy Carden) and knucklehead classmate Bowman (Kalon Cox), they scramble to contain the chaos without losing sight of what the monsters really represent.
The genius of Sketch lies in its visual language. The creatures look exactly like a child drew them - lumpy proportions, uneven lines, colours that don’t quite stay inside the shapes, not dissimilar to the subtly uncanny nightmare fuel of Spongebob’s Frankendoodle episode. They’re charming and unnerving in equal measure, a reminder that kids’ imaginations can be quite weird. Worley leans into this, letting the designs feel tactile and imperfect, aiding to stretch the film's meager $3 million budget into something that feels like a true adventure.
Belle’s Amber is the standout here - prickly, funny, and guarded. She never plays the character as one note; instead, she gives us a kid who’s smart enough to know she’s hurting but not yet equipped to process it, often resulting in believable outbursts of anger. Make no mistake though, all three of the main children are fantastic, the script slowly developing on their group dynamic. On the B-plot side of things, Hale brings warmth and awkwardness to the dad role, while Carden’s Aunt Liz adds a dry, grounding humour that keeps the film from tipping too far into saccharine sentimentality.
What makes Sketch stick the landing is its refusal to “solve” grief. The ending doesn’t banish the monsters so much as invite them to coexist - a gentle, resonant metaphor for living with loss. It’s a rare family film that trusts its audience, young and old, to sit with complicated feelings without sanding down the edges. Sketch is a charming, chaotic blend of fantasy, gateway horror, and emotional earnestness - heartfelt and imaginative, leaving one with the sense that your own little creative scribbles might be worth keeping.
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Sketch is screening in cinemas from Thursday the 18th of September. For tickets and more info, click here.