★★☆☆☆

TONE is a difficult thing to get right but the control of it can wonderfully make or spectacularly break a film. This fairly ambitious but rather bizarre and tonally erratic family drama proves just how important that balance is.

Henry (Midnight Special’s Jaeden Lieberher) is an extremely intelligent 11-year-old boy who lives with his caring and fun single mum Susan (Naomi Watts) and wide-eyed younger brother Peter (Room’s Jacob Tremblay). Henry is so smart he basically runs the household finances, ignoring painful headaches as he checks up on their shrewdly-invested stocks while also trying to live a normal family life.

Their seemingly idyllic existence is interrupted, however, when Henry starts to notice his classmate and next door neighbour Christina (Maddy Ziegler) is acting very withdrawn. He soon begins to suspect that her stepfather (Dean Norris) – a police commissioner with a sterling public reputation – might be abusing her.

It has all the ingredients of an effective, bring-the-whole-family weepy; an everyday leading boy on a righteous mission, picturesque scenes of family bonding and the potential for tragedy and heartache that life so often brings. So why then does it feel so cloying and manipulative?

Under the direction of Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World, the upcoming Star Wars Episode IX) and writer Gregg Hurwitz, it never feels like a view of real people but rather like thinly-drawn fantasies. In spite of amiable performances by an impressive cast, particularly Lieberher and Tremblay, we’re never led to believe in them and that’s a major issue when it’s supposed to be hitting home with the audience’s emotions.

Then there’s tone of the drama, which does a juggling act between about 17 different things, from prototypical Sundance quirkiness, to deathly serious drama about dark topics like abuse and grief, to a bizarre revenge thriller. All without the panache to blend it together into a cohesive whole, leaving it feeling like several different incomplete and rather misguided films jammed together.

You can almost forgive it for the first half in a kind of morbid curiosity about its own sense of bizarre ambition to be everything all at once. But a mid-point twist of fate takes things from the intriguingly unfiltered to the downright ludicrous wherein the script hinges on too many absurd beats to feel like anything resembling real anymore. Any nuggets of truthfulness there dotted throughout get engulfed by the increasing level of nonsense.

The tragedy undercuts the cutesiness that it initially strives for while the slamming on of the breaks into full-on heartbreak mode is treated with a shallow lack of care. Misfortune gets used as a tool for sheer manipulation, furthering its dissent into something quite unsettling and uncomfortable that dilutes any well-meaning intentions. The result is one of the most befuddling Hollywood dramas in quite some time.