Beautiful Creatures (2013)
Certified: 14
Duration: 124 minutes
Directed: Richard LaGravenese
Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum, Thomas Mann, Emma Thompson, Margo Martindale, Eileen Atkins
KRS release

Alden Ehrenreich is Ethan Wate, a youth attending junior high school in a small South Carolina town.

The film does not overdo its fantastical elements and plays well as teenage drama and adventure

His mother has died and he lives with his father. Their housekeeper Amma (Viola Davis) takes care of them.

Ethan is very good friends with Link (Thomas Mann) whose mother, Mrs Lincoln (Emma Thompson), is an important figure in town. Then there is Emily (Zoey Deutch), Ethan’s ex-girlfriend, who has a firm belief that the local library should ban certain books.

This particular family, led by Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons), is hosting a niece, teenager Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), who will soon attend the local school.

Emily and Lena do not hit it off. However, Ethan reaches out to her as he sees in her a love of literature like him and, more than that, a connection to his dreams about the American Civil War.

That is when one finds out that Lena and her family are casters – individuals who can use and wield magic. When she turns 16, Lena will either reinforce the good in her or become an evil creature.

If she becomes evil, then she will be walking in the same footsteps of her mother, Sarafine (Thompson) and cousin Ridley Duchannes (Emmy Rossum).

So Ethan is faced with quite a backlash as all the town waits for Lena’s birthday and its repercussions.

Post-Twilight, the novel and the film, the publishing world and the movie industry were rocked to the hilt.

Beautiful Creatures is an adaptation of the bestselling young adult novel written in 2003 by schoolteacher Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, a video game designer. This led to three sequels of the books and this film adaptation.

The choice of director, Richard LaGravanese, seems an unusual one since he was the writer of the classic The Fisher King (1991). This was a major fantasy picture but his following oeuvre never struck him out as being a particular exponent of the genre.

In spite of this, he manages to capture both the mood and the feel quite well.

Highly influenced by Twilight in its outlook but not in style, Beautiful Creatures takes its twist on the vampire saga – with a boy instead of a girl falling in love with a supernatural girl and also taking on board her supernatural family.

The film brings along a youthful leading couple that comes across well but also has an esteemed supporting cast with the likes of Irons and Thompson.

The duo ham it up with gusto and they look as if they are having quite a bit of guilty fun.

What LaGravanese does differently is that he does not opt to go down the Twilight route and saves us from any undue sexual overtones. As a result, the film has more movement and flow to it and is thus more entertaining.

The film does not overdo its fantastical elements and plays well as teenage drama and adventure, providing Twilight fans and teens in general with a magical casting dessert after their favourite franchise winded down.

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