117 min | PG | December 9, 2022 | TriStar Pictures
A five-year-old genius is born to parents who consider reading a character flaw and shipped off to a school run by a child-hating tyrant. She fights back with books, telekinesis, and spite. Roald Dahl always knew kids were smarter than the adults running their lives, and this one proves it.
Matilda Wormwood is a five-year-old genius born to parents who treat intelligence as a defect. She loves books. Her father wants her watching television and her mother wants her gone. The film is an adaptation of the Tim Minchin stage musical, and it understands that Roald Dahl’s real subject is power. Children have none, adults abuse what they have, and Matilda decides the arrangement is negotiable.
Alisha Weir plays Matilda with a stillness that the surrounding chaos never penetrates. She delivers the character’s defiance as quiet calculation rather than precocious sass. Emma Thompson plays headmistress Agatha Trunchbull buried under prosthetics and a hammer-thrower’s posture, swinging children by their pigtails and relishing every cruelty. She plays the villain as a wounded gym teacher who weaponized her own misery. Lashana Lynch plays Miss Honey with a fragility that the role usually flattens into sweetness, and Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough turn the Wormwood parents into grotesques who believe their own neglect is good parenting.
Matthew Warchus directs from Dennis Kelly’s screenplay and stages the numbers with the scale of a sound stage rather than a proscenium. The “Revolting Children” sequence floods the school with bodies and primary color, and the editing cuts to the rhythm of the choreography instead of fighting it. The “When I Grow Up” number puts children on playground swings that arc out over the audience, and the camera rides the motion so the song becomes physical. The production design pushes the Trunchbull’s school into Gothic exaggeration, all iron gates and institutional gray. The film looks expensive and uses the money on the screen.
The problem is that the film never stops. Warchus packs every frame with motion and every scene with a number, and the busyness flattens the quieter material that gives the story its weight. Matilda’s storytelling subplot, the strongest invention of the stage show, gets rushed when it should breathe. The result is a faithful and energetic translation that mistakes volume for emotion. It is a good adaptation of a great musical, and it works hardest in the moments when it finally holds still.