Sketch: Movie Review

Cast: Tony Hale, D'Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Cox
Director: Seth Worley

Visually inventive and emotionally complex in places, sketches power comes from not treating its audience or its characters like fools.

While the marketing artwork puts you in mind of John Krasinski's If and some themes are familiar, this tale of a family bereft but inert after their mother and wife is gone is nothing short of one of 2025's best.

With impressive youngster acting and a feeling of the old style Amblin films with a darker edge, sketch makes great fist of the emotional complexity of grief and loss, without overegging the pudding.

The story is relatively simple - one day after discovering a magic pond and dropping his broken mobile phone in it before discovering it's been fixed, older brother Jack (Lawrence) thinks about taking his dead mother's ashes there. Discovering his plan, younger sister Amber (Belle), who's been drawing her feelings in a book, the pair clash by the water's edge - leading to her sketchbook falling into the water, bringing the contents dangerously to life.

This inventive fable is the kind of fare that children need more of.

Sure there's a message within and a tale of tackling grief, but whether it's the visual flair of the cartoons coming to life or being dispatched in a crayon-style cloud, the film's clever use of lo-fi budget ideas and high concepts meshes wonderfully together.

It's not for younger audiences in parts though, with some scenes leaning dangerously into the more sinister and frightening edges. Spiders that have been drawn by Amber as eyes on eight legs with a penchant for stealing personal effects are a great idea on paper, but in this film, they come terrifyingly to life and even form part of a very clever Psycho visual riff.

But that's the thing about Sketch - it has adult sensibilities coursing through its veins, and never once forgets that it's a family film that's not interested in talking down to its subjects. There's a great sense of imagination on display here and a filmmaker whose debut is nothing short of truly original.