This film, at first glance, is a well-known type of familiar family drama, but viewers should not make hasty conclusions, its plot can surprise them. Reviews of the "Book of Henry" confirm this.
Producer
Universal Studio created this picture for a period not exceeding two months.
After Jurassic World and Security Is Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow returned with this slightly strange low-budget drama, directing Henry's Book.
Heroes
By and large, there are three of them, and at different periods of film narration, they alternately come to the fore. It must be said right away that in the film "The Book of Henry" the actors were wonderful. Naomi Watts, who needs no introduction, plays Susan, mom. Her eldest son, whose notepad or book gave the name to the film, appears to us in the image of Jaden Liberer. This fourteen-year-old actor was recently spotted in the fresh horror film "It." And finally, the youngest in this trio is eleven-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who sparkled in the 2015 film “The Room”. He plays the younger brother, Peter. In the movie “The Book of Henry,” the actors fit together. They act synergistically, the emotions they show are true, which is why cinema evokes such trust.
The plot of the film "The Book of Henry"
Susan, a single mother, works diligently as a waitress, she has two minor children in her arms.
Senior Henry is brilliant, from the very first shots of The Book of Henry they let us know. When at school he speaks to the class with the project “What Heritage We Will Leave After Us”, he makes a lengthy abstract speech using words such as “existential”. The dumbfounded teacher strongly recommends that he transfer to a school for gifted children.
Later, he advises his mother about stock trading and the volatility of her securities and shares. Manages family finances and gives mother practical advice, making up for Susan’s missing life partner in these matters.
It looks unusual: Henry sits at the expense and papers in the evening, and his mother, with visible excitement, cuts into a shooter on the game console. They seemed to have swapped places, a child and an adult. However, the established order of things does not prevent the family from living amicably and happily.
The clouds are gathering
But life is not always so cloudless, and bad omens sneak into this cell of society. First, in the frames of the 2017 film “Henry's Book”, there appears a moment when the eldest son wakes up from a painful headache and takes some pills. Then he begins to notice oddities in the behavior of the neighbor's girl Christina. She is closed and unsociable, lives alone with her stepfather, Mr. Sickleman, a local police officer. Henry feels sympathy for the girl and involuntarily glances at the windows of her house. One evening, he sees in them a picture that allows him to conclude that Sickleman harasses the stepdaughter.
In addition to being a brilliant child, Henry has a heightened sense of justice. It was this personal quality that determined the further development of the plot of The Book of Henry. He decides to save Christina at all costs. The boy asks the school principal to contact the guardianship authorities in connection with the violence against Christina, but she refuses because of the lack of strong evidence. Henry calls the anonymous hotline for victims of domestic violence and asks them to take action. As a result, he sees from the window of his house that a person from custody comes to Siklman, they warmly greet each other. A neighbor is a well-known respectable citizen in the city, a policeman, hardly anyone dares to blame him for such dirty crimes. Nothing changes.
Taking action
That is what the subsequent set of actions that the protagonist of the 2017 film Henry's Book took took. Having exhausted all legal ways to save his little neighbor, he begins his investigation.
Suddenly, Henry has a seizure, cramps and is taken to the hospital. A strong scene follows. The boy is unconscious, the doctors require Susan to immediately sign the consent to the emergency operation, and she, who is not used to making independent decisions and who relies on her son in solving difficult issues, keeps saying: “I need to ask Henry.”
Headaches that tormented the boy were the harbingers of a much more serious illness. He undergoes an operation to remove a brain tumor. When the boy woke up and a neurosurgeon came in, the young genius begins to ask him such highly specialized questions about his cancer that it simply confuses the doctor.
The director uses a forbidden technique, Henry is terminally ill and will die soon. This plot twist causes the desire to write a strong review of the “Henry Book”. The boy dies after some time. Susan and Peter are crushed. They do not know how to live on. Mom cannot get out of this terrible numbness from the loss of her son, she is poorly adapted to life without him. She needs Henry's advice more than ever, but he is not. To top it off, she is fired from her job, and yet she still needs to take care of her youngest son.
From all this, tears welling up in his eyes, such scenes prompt the viewer to write a review of the “Henry's Book” as a tragic dramatic picture.
The first glimmer of light in the veil of grief over the remnants of the family was that Peter remembered that his older brother had told his mother to read his notebook, that is, the Book of Henry.
Plan
What follows is a very unexpected plot twist. Henry, in the last weeks of his life, was busy detailing the plan that his mother had to execute after his death. This plan involved the murder of Mr. Sickleman, since there was no other way to save Christina from his harassment.
He wrote detailed instructions for his mother, who was to bring this plan to life, in his notebook (Henry's book), and also left them in dictaphone records.
Susan, who also saw scenes in the window of the neighboring house, suggesting that Sickleman was pestering her stepdaughter, readily began to implement the plan to eliminate him. She buys a rifle with a powerful optical sight, learns to shoot from it.
Her son’s recorded voice recorded in the headphones, giving her instructions and even predicting her reaction to them, creates the illusion that he is nearby.
All this preparation for the murder of the alleged rapist, quasi-communication with her son, tear her from the clutches of depression, give her life a new meaning.
The film material is presented in such a way that such a question is not rejected by the audience (the majority of viewers, let’s say so). The commission of the murder of a person whose guilt has not been proven in court, legally innocent, seems justified and even advisable.
Implementation of the plan is scheduled for the day when the school will host a talent contest. Susan, having secured herself an alibi, lures Sickleman into a trap and must shoot him. Henry on the tape recording says to her headphones: "Focus, aim, shoot!". She is almost ready to pull the trigger, but suddenly sees clearly: only a child gives these tips, she cannot do this. The murder did not take place. However, Susan tells Sickleman that he knows about everything that he does with his stepdaughter, and he will have to answer for what he has done.
At the same time, at school, Christina performs a dance. The director, seeing her, understands that there is no way to hush up this matter anymore, she calls the police and guardianship.
When police cars drove up to Sickleman’s house, he shot himself.
Reviews
Despite the fact that there are reviews on the “Book of Henry” with the following content: “The peculiarities of Henry’s idiosyncratic personality lead the plot to bizarre changes”, “quite unexpectedly sentimentalism paves the way for suspense cleaner than Hitchcock’s” or “this film product contains the most ridiculous twists of the narrative among films of this years ”, this tape leaves a good impression. There was no need to arrange lynching, which did not prevent the revenge from happening.