105 min | PG-13 | October 21, 2022 | Netflix
Kat Elliot is a haunted teenager with a dead family and a chip on her shoulder. Two scheming demon brothers offer to raise the dead if she helps them claw out of the underworld. Henry Selick builds a gorgeous handcrafted Hell and then crams three movies into it.
Kat Elliot is a thirteen-year-old orphan who carries the guilt of her parents’ death. She lands at a Catholic boarding school in a dying town she once called home. Two demon brothers named Wendell and Wild plot their escape from the underworld and need a Hell Maiden to drag them to the surface. Kat is that maiden, and her power to raise the dead becomes the engine of the plot. Henry Selick and Jordan Peele wrap a coming-of-age story around grief and then bolt on a subplot about a private prison company trying to seize the town. The film is really about who profits when a community collapses and who gets blamed for it.
Lyric Ross plays Kat with a hard shell and a real wound underneath. She gives the character anger instead of cute defiance, and the performance never asks the audience to find her adorable. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele voice Wendell and Wild as a bickering double act, and their timing carries scenes the script leaves thin. Angela Bassett plays Sister Helley with a gravity that gives the supernatural rules weight. Ving Rhames booms as Buffalo Belzer, the demon father who runs an underworld theme park of suffering, and James Hong sharpens every line as Father Bests. Sam Zelaya plays Raúl Cocolotl, a transgender classmate, with a quiet steadiness that grounds Kat’s story.
Henry Selick returns to stop-motion after Coraline, and the craft stays tactile in a way digital animation cannot fake. The hair moves wrong on purpose. Fingerprints live in the clay surfaces. Selick designs Kat with green-tipped hair and a punk wardrobe that reads as a real teenager instead of a mascot, and he renders Belzer’s underworld as a sprawling carnival of torment built from handmade detail. The script by Selick and Peele crowds every frame with invention. The editing sprints through plot beats to keep all of it moving, and the pace rarely lets a single image breathe.
The trouble is that the film wants to be too many things at once. It is a grief story, a buddy comedy, a horror fable, a satire of for-profit incarceration, and a portrait of a Black girl finding her footing. Each thread deserves its own movie. Selick has the visual imagination to make any of them sing, but the screenplay keeps cutting away before a moment can settle. The result is dense and inventive and exhausting in equal measure. Wendell & Wild hands you more than you can hold and trusts the texture to cover for the rush.