Netflix brought horror fantasy for children this month, released on 15th September 2021. The movie is an American dark film fantasy, and David Yarovesky directed, and Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis wrote “Nightbooks”.Â
This movie is based on 2018’s horror fantasy of a children’s book.Â
Plot of the movie
The movie starts with a little boy named Alex Mosher who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is a good writer who obsesses over scary stories.
He’s so passionate about writing stories. He names his books “Nightbooks”. However, not everybody of his age has this kind of gift. He writes all the time, and other kids in his school freaked out and left him alone. None of his friends comes to his birthday party.
So, he decides to burn all his stories, all of them he wrote and forget about writing anymore. So, he packs his diaries, leaves the house and gets into his apartment’s lift.
After some moment, he realises that life is not going down, then he opens the lift door and finds himself trapped there. He gets trapped in a magical house where there is no one, screams calling his parents name, but no one comes.
Then he meets with the movie villain named Natacha, the witch who wants to kill him. But Alex says that he is helpful to her, and he writes horrifying stories. So, Natacha keeps him and lets him live because she wants to hear scary stories.Â
Alex saves himself for the day, but he knows he cannot write anymore. So, he starts looking for an escape. Meanwhile, he tells Natacha stories every night that he already has in his diary, which he was about to burn.
Also, he meets with Yasmin and Lenore, other characters of the movie. Lenore is the pet cat of Natacha and Yasmin is her servant.
They eventually become Alex’s friends. In that magical moving house of Natacha, there is an extensive library where Natacha sends him to sit and write peacefully.
The first day Lenore was spying on him, but from the next, he started looking for escape clues.
Alex and Yasmin find out about a little girl who was trapped there and escaped long before. They get to know that the Unicorn girl used a sleeping potion on the witch and ran.
Alex and Yasmin collect all the ingredients, but they need a herb to hide the potion’s spell. So, Alex writes a story about “Bindweed”, assuming that this is the herb that suppresses the smell, but later Natacha says it is Cina root that hides the spell or potion, and Bindweed separates liquids from each other.
After the day, Yasmin and Alex make the potion and put it in the lemonade, but it turns out green in colour, they get worried, but Lenore then puts it in Natacha’s spray.
So, she falls asleep, and they get the keys and opens the door. But they get trapped again in Hansel and Gretel’s story, where they get to know that there’s an original witch whose magic Natacha uses.
Natacha was not a witch; she was a little girl like them, but the original witch trapper her and her friends to eat them.
And one day, Natacha got out, but when she returned to her family, there was no one, so she returned and put the original witch to sleep forever.
Alex’s stories are not for Natacha; those are for the original witch because scary stories with no happy endings are like lullabies.
Meantime, the original witch awakes, and Natacha tells Alex to tell a frightening tale unless the original witch starts eating them.
Natacha tells him to tell why Alex wanted to burn his writings as this is the scariest. So, he speaks about his painful birthday, and his best friend Josh left him and did not understand his stories, and then the original witch starts to fall asleep.
Still, he tricks Natacha and also continues about how Natacha captured him and liked his stories.
The ending of Alex’s story triggers the original witch, and she awakes and fights with Natacha, then goes after Alex, Yasmin and Lenore, but Alex again starts telling a story and lures her into the fire.
Yasmin says, “I’m starting to believe in happy endings”. But the movie reveals that Natacha is still alive.
My Review
“Nightbooks” was released on 15th September and I watched it today with my sister. We both enjoyed it. I feel it would be a good watch for kids because the movie is designed for tiny kids.
And I can say that it won’t disappoint your children. It’s more like a scary fantasy that we all used to have in our childhood.
The evil witch scares everybody, captures them, eats them, turns them into animals, dolls, etcetera. It is kind of cute, and obviously, I’d recommend you to watch it and rate it with a 4.5 on 5.
