The life is in the eyes: viewing A Monster Calls (dir. J. A. Bayona, 2016)
Having earlier this year received counselling for mental health issues, I found the many topics raised in A Monster Calls deeply affecting and cathartic. Like Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall), I was a child who lost a parent to illness and at around the same time experienced extremes of either being bullied or being ignored at school. The other kids either didn’t know how to treat me, or thought I was an easy target. I was placid, and big for my age. Aligning this with hardwired gender constructs, they decided I was ‘manly’, stoic and strong, never once considering that I was breaking inside and needed my pain to be treated as normal. It was easier to shut me down and confuse me about my gender identity than to dare disrupt their safe assumptions that parents lived to old age. At 32 years old, I was still getting bullied, this time in a bigger playground by people who could exert even more power over me. Like my childhood experience, when I defied their expectations and stoo...