Producers: Steve Taylor, Tony Hale, Kevin Downes, Daryl Lefever and Katelyn Botsch   Director: Seth Worley   Screenplay: Seth Worley   Cast: Tony Hale, D’Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Cox, Jaxen Kenner, Genesis Rose Brown, Nadia Benavides and Randa Newman   Distributor: Angel Studios

Grade: B-

Grief combines with magic to yield some truly peculiar results in “Sketch,” a debut feature from writer-director-editor Seth Worley that exhibits lots of inspiration and plenty of good intentions—perhaps a bit too much of both.

The focus is on the Wyatt family, which has recently suffered a major loss—the death of beloved wife and mother Ally.  Bereaved single dad Taylor (Tony Hale) is coping as best he can, keeping his feelings under control while removing Ally’s photos from the walls and accepting the help of his sister Liz (D’Arcy Carden) in preparing the house, located on a large rural lot near a lake, for sale. 

His two children, Jack (Kue Lawrence) and Amber (Bianca Belle), are dealing with their feelings in their own ways.  Jack visits the lake where Ally used to walk.  Belle draws dark images in her notebook reflecting her profound sadness.  She also scrawls doddles of the revenge she dreams of taking on classmate Bowman (Kalon Cox), an obnoxious little bully.

When one of those—showing her stabbing the kid—comes to the attention of the school, Amber’s interviewed by a counselor (Nadia Benavides) who gives her a sketchbook with a kitten on its cover and encourages her to continue expressing her emotions.  She responds by adding dark scrawls to the book’s cheerful cover and filling the pages with images of strange monsters. 

Meanwhile Jack, exploring around the lake, accidentally drops his broken cellphone into the water.  When he retrieves it, the phone’s repaired.  When a cut on his hand disappears after dipping it into the lake, he deduces that the water has magical restorative powers and plans to take the box with Ally’s ashes there in hopes of bringing her back to life.  Before he can do so, however, Amber’s notebook is dropped in the water, and the beasts she’s sketched in it are released into the world. 

Or sort of.  In the forms devised by visual effects supervisor Dan Sturm, whether they’re small spiderlike critters or odd mid-sized ones or huge, lumbering creatures, they have the texture of colorful, fuzzy fabric—rather Muppet-like. 

One of them, a blue globe with a large eye and long tentacles, is the first to appear, arising from the fields and terrorizing Jack, Amber and Bowman, as well as a few other kids, as they’re riding in a school bus that’s stopped at a distance from the wreck of a pickup truck.  With the driver (Randa Newman) unconscious and the beast trying to get in, the kids escape via an emergency exit and flee into the woods.  The plot focuses on Jack, Amber and Bowman, who join forces to evade and, when necessary, fight the creatures, as well as dark apparitions that are even more threatening.  Meanwhile Taylor and Liz are desperately searching for the children. 

Obviously allegory is at work here: the creatures are manifestations of Amber’s unresolved grief and fears, and vanquishing them (when swatted many explode in puffs of colored smoke) represents the process of facing trauma and achieving closure that she and her brother must go through.  Bowman accompanies them as a kind of comic foil, often playing the coward but sometimes displaying surprising courage.

Overall Worley does a nice job of balancing messages and scares in a way that avoids either becoming oppressively heavy-handed or traumatizing the youngsters in the audience.  (Some children might nonetheless find the scenes of kids battling the creatures, particularly the more formidable apparitions, too frightening, though in this day and age they’ve probably seen far worse.  Parents should, however, be aware of the possibility and make their decisions accordingly.)  Belle and Lawrence (the latter of whom you might recall from the recent “Marshmallow”) are both strong child actors, and while Cox has a tendency to overplay, that’s part of Bowman’s makeup.  The adults tend to be stuck in more obvious roles, and though Hale tries hard, Taylor pretty much remains a befuddled nebbish.  Megan Stacey’s cinematography and Madison Braun’s production design use the Tennessee locations well enough, and Cody Fry’s score aims to bolster both the emotional undercurrents and the excitement.

“Sketch” doesn’t have the polish and pizzazz of the eighties family movies it’s channeling, but its heart is in the right place, and the likably low-brow effects have a pleasantly retro feel.   Incidentally, the movie is an expansion of a short film called “Darker Colors” that Worley made five years ago.  If you’d like to do a comparison, it’s available on YouTube.