Should we hold children’s films up to the same standard as adult films? That’s what I was left asking myself after this super-saturated fable that felt like Wes Anderson meets Disney meets a Grimm’s fairy tale.

We are in the fictional island of Carpathia in the Black Sea, so imagine steep mountains and dark forests and ramshackle wooden cabins. Yuri (Helena Zengel) lives with her father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and adopted brother Petro (Finn Wolfhard) in the middle of the forest. Her father is a slightly unhinged leader of a brigade of teenage boys, all obsessed with hunting and killing the local monster, the ochi.

It’s not hard to see where this story is going as soon as we see a baby ochi, the child maybe of the lead ochi as they both have blue faces. The baby is like a cross between an orangutan and Yoda and immediately feels like a creature specifically designed to tug on our emotions and protective instincts.

Yuri has a missing mother, Dasha, played by Emily Watson, and the narrative plays out some fairly heavy-handed and clichéd story arcs; abandoned children, abusive fathers, monsters who turn out to be not so monstrous. There were a lot of children in the audience at my screening and the dark aspects seemed to play well with childhood fears – a child behind me intermittently saying “I am scared, I am scared.”

The art direction and staging is weirdly artificial for a film that is promoted as using real locations in Romania, mostly in camera effects and puppets. Every shot looks saturated and like it was filmed in a studio with a dose of AI – in this way it is perhaps like a children’s story book and I can imagine this rendered in graphic novel form with Yuri’s yellow jacket and red backpack standing out against the rendered backgrounds.

I think where it falls down is in not giving us any depth to any character and assuming that children, and the families in the cinema with them, will be satisfied with very broad strokes and laboured messaging. It’s world building is not clear – are the ochi really a threat? Is Maxim creating his child army just to play out his anger at women? Is this a metaphor for incel culture? Any potential sub-text remains unrealised. The final scenes are particularly cloying and undermine our abilities as film watchers to read between the lines and understand emotions without them being laid on thick.

Having said that though the moment when the mum plays the flute in the final act actually made me feel teary. Damn you Emily Watson.