The Changeover

Young adult book adaptations into sickly movies have been a thing for a while now, from Twilight to the Host to Divergent to Hunger Games and beyond. Here we see New Zealand have a go at it, and it's the same as the US tends to deliver.

Telling the story of a girl who must face an evil force in order to save her little brother this is a witchy themed thing, and the above description of sickly most definitely applies.

Starring Timothy Spall and Lucy Lawless I'm being a tad generous here, it's a really quite bad film.

You see it's your usual teen angst vs less than normal love interest vs nonsensical convoluted plot hole ridden concept. To make matters worse the two leads are awful! Nicholas Galitzine is your stoic dull mysterious brooding "Hunk" and Erana James is the Kiwi Kristen Stewart and has the acting ability of a brick. The two of them pick one facial expression at the start and continue it for the full duration of the movie.

If you like your schmaltzy teen angst nonsense then you might enjoy this, otherwise steer clear.

The Good:

Spall is oddly on form

Decent soundtrack

The Bad:

So much teen angst!

The two leads have the emotional range of a fart

I really went in to watching this film with high hopes. Teenager discovers she has hidden powers and tries to rescue her younger brother. Story starts off well and had my interest for about 30 minutes in and THEN it fell flat. The actors are actually perfect but the movie tried to form chemistry between the main actor and actress in a way that did not fit with the movie. There was a lack of build up for the audience, I kept waiting to be amazed while the main actress discovers herself but truth is she remained boring until the very end. This movie could have been great, may be lack of funding but something was wrong so therefore i could only give it a 3/10.

When I saw the name Timothy Spall, I thought this was going to be great, surely such a great actor would only sign up to a great film right, wrong? Him apart it is a poor film, I've not read the book, but I'll judge the film based on what I've seen. Quite simply put, the ideas and plot are excellent, and rather original. What it lacked sadly, was any pace, urgency, tension or real threat, it's another so called horror movie that is advisable for people up to the age of fifteen. Spall is the only real positive, but he's wasted here. 4/10

Not an amazing film but definitely not a bad one either. I liked the plot as it was a bit original. It not scary but has it's creepy moments. Definitely worth the watch

I didn't know anything about the novel. I mainly watched it because I saw Timothy Spall's name. I found this movie engaging. Because of an element in the plot a large part of the movie has a surreal, dreamlike quality. The young female lead, Erana James, is very good. She has a fierceness that makes her character very believable. I'm not a huge fan of 'young adult' fiction. I usually find it condescending to its target audience but I got into this movie pretty quickly and it kept me to the end. Definitely worth a watch if you're channel surfing and come across it.