Avis Metacritic

It’s intermittently funny, mopey, and tense, sometimes totally off-base but certainly ambitious in its approach.

The only way to appreciate The Book of Henry is by treating it as the movie equivalent of a summer read, a beach book that tries to pack in the full breadth of human experience into a few too many pages.

Watching The Book of Henry feels like being gaslit.

The entire thing feels forced and hollow, less an authentic expression of the human experience and more a gee-whiz exercise in cleverness, slathered in a healthy coat of multiplex-friendly weirdness.

The preposterousness of Gregg Hurwitz's screenplay isn't enough to throw star Naomi Watts off her game, and the actor's sincere performance may suffice to keep a segment of the family-film demographic on board, barely.

The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics.

The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.

The film’s muted yet still rather flamboyant terribleness derives from the fact that it seems to be juggling three or four borderline schlock genres at once.

Schmaltzy, manipulative, and tonally schizophrenic, The Book of Henry is such a monumentally misguided venture that it ends up being oddly, if unintentionally, compelling.

The Book of Henry is the most misguided film since the 2003 Gary Oldman abomination "Tiptoes." Trevorrow is slated to helm an upcoming Star Wars film, so y’all have fun with that.