Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them

Monsters take over America in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, making it ideal for our potty new world.

J.K. Rowling says her Fantastic Beasts franchise will stretch across five different films.

Normally, such a declaration – a ten-year commitment! – would inspire existential palpitations. I mean, is there even gonna be an America in ten years’ time?

I was heartened to find the first instalment – even at a bladder-busting 133-minutes – entrancing from the opening moment to its last. It convinced me to sign on then and there for this mortgage-level life investment.

(If we can devote nearly 20 hours to O.J. Simpson in 2016 alone, let’s give Rowling’s expansive universe at least half that.)

Director David Yates knows what it’s like to get lost in a Rowling-induced time-suck, having spent most of the 2000s making Harry Potters. Following his ill-fated excursion into the jungle for The Legend of Tarzan, he returns to friendlier territory with Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, adapted by Rowling from her faux-encyclopaedia of the same name (written under the pen name ‘Newt Scamander’).

Set in the 1920s, it’s a prequel to Rowling’s signature series, setting the stage for the inevitable war between evil, human-slaughtering wizards and the rest of the magical community, still in denial about its darker, more fascistic factions. You know, for kids!

Fantastic Beasts’ “author”, Newt Scamander, is the hero here, played by the mumbly, fidgety Eddie Redmayne. His mischievous beast-handler arrives in New York to return a captured animal to the States. Trouble starts when his bottomless, TARDIS-sized suitcase accidentally spills open, loosing some of his precious monsters upon the city.

He gets nabbed mid-mischief by Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), a disgraced ‘Auror’ (basically: magic cop), for embroiling the ‘no-maj’ (sorry, ‘muggle’) Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) in his efforts to recover the rampant beasties. The three of them, later joined by Tina’s mind-reading flapper sis Queenie (Alison Sudol), wind up on the wrong side of Percival Graves (Colin Farrell), an Auror with maybe-nefarious intentions in mind. He is, after all, named Graves. Rowling loves that nominative determinism.

There’s more at play, of course, but why spoil the only Potter-adjacent flick that doesn’t already have its plot etched in the public consciousness?

Rowling, whose imagination is seemingly boundless, has mostly translated her talent of creating irresistible page-turners with her absorbing first screenplay. Though there are dry stretches where some condensing might have been appreciated – again: 133 minutes – there’s something appealing about her applying a novelist’s patience to feature filmmaking. I’ll take that over blockbuster bloat any day of the week.

Given his preoccupations for the past decade, Yates’ former career as director of intimate thrillers set behind closed doors feels like a half-forgotten dream. There’s no denying he can wrangle CGI creatures; one - an adorable, pick-pocket platypus of sorts - provides the biggest slapstick laughs. Yet, it’s when he reaches back to his other skills that he proves his worth.

Take the blandly insidious ‘death chamber’ within the walls of the Magical Congress of the United States of America, which feels as if it’s been cribbed from Black Mirror. The sequence set within it – devoid of adorable CGI monsters – marks the movie’s strange, unsettling highlight. The entire Harry Potter series has held the idea that evil hides and festers in unwieldy, unchecked bureaucratic institutions. Tasked with splitting wonder with banal terror, Yates reminds us how well he’s equipped for this gargantuan job.

Redmayne is refreshingly not-distracting here. That’s not the same as ‘charming’, but it’s also not the same as ‘film-derailing’, so we’ll take it. Waterston’s Tina Goldstein is a more active, engaging protagonist, while Samantha Morton and Ezra Miller, as members of an anti-witch ‘no-maj’ cult, are wickedly creepy, complicated villains. All humans, however, cede the floor to those fantastic beasts, gloriously and humanely realised. If you leave talking about Redmayne, you were probably watching it wrong.

Rowling’s always been a politically-minded author, and though she’s equivocated when it comes to LGBTQI representation in the Harry Potter series, she offers a nod here by noting that the magical aren’t legally allowed to marry the non-magical in 1920s America (a law Newt finds offensive).

Elsewhere, her leanings are even more explicit, revealing how witches and wizards, forced to hide their true selves out of fear of discrimination, find themselves grappling with a rage they can no longer control. The antagonists of Fantastic Beasts are not the titular characters; rather, those in power who manipulate the weak into lashing out. Their aspiration? Full-scale extermination of the enemy. You do not need to look far to find real-world analogues, in any corner of the globe.

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is a rollicking, cheekily funny picture that doesn’t shy away from grim realities, resulting in something profound. Now that’s magic.

4/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for fantasy themes and violence.

Photo: Warner Bros.