‘The Changeover’ Is A YA Movie With No Bite

Ever since the conclusion of the Twilight and The Hunger Games sagas, there has been a gap in the Teen Paranormal Romance subgenre (that’s a real section at Barnes & Noble, by the way). The Divergent series came close to filling the void before it petered out, while The Host failed to even get its franchise off the ground. Now, a new challenger appears to take up the quest, a little movie from New Zealand called The Changeover.

Set near Christchurch, New Zealand, The Changeover is about a teenaged girl named Laura Chant (Erana James from “Sons of Liars”) who has taken it upon herself to care for her younger brother, Jacko (newcomer Benji Purchase), while her mother, Kate (Melanie Lynskey from Digging for Fire and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World), works to make ends meet. One afternoon, Laura and Jacko meet a strange man named Carmody Braque (Timothy Spall from the Harry Potter movies) in a run-down old shop, and while Jacko is charmed by the stranger, Laura is creeped out.

After the encounter, Jacko mysteriously falls ill. One of Laura’s schoolmates, a preppie fellow named Sorenson “Sorey” Carlisle (Nicholas Galitzine from The Watcher in the Woods), claims to be able to offer help. He introduces Laura to his mother, Miryam (Lucy Lawless, best known as Xena: Warrior Princess), and grandmother, Winter (Kate Harcourt from Savage Islands), who reveal to Laura that Carmody is an evil being. Luckily, Miryam and Winter are witches (as is Sorey), and even more luckily, Laura has the ability to become one, too. The only way that Laura can save her brother is for her to “Changeover” and become a witch herself so that she can defeat the demon Carmody.

The Carnegie Medal-winning young adult book by Margaret Mahy upon which screenwriter Stuart McKenzie based The Changeover was published in 1984, so it predates the Twilight and The Hunger Games series by more than 20 years, but the comparisons are still fair. The movie, co-directed by McKenzie and collaborator/wife Miranda Harcourt, is a tame affair, part coming-of-age drama and part supernatural thriller, but will probably have some appeal to its tween audience. And it’s a bit of a shame that The Changeover was made into a movie after all of those Twilight books, because it’s essentially Twilight for witches.

The Changeover starts off promisingly enough with sort of a Something Wicked This Way Comes kind of a vibe. The first act, in which Laura and Jacko meet Carmody and the enigmatic man works his charm and magic long enough to place his curse on the boy, is compelling and engaging, almost chilling at times. But once that initial push wears off and the pieces of the mystery start to fall into place, there’s a tonal shift in the movie that goes from spooky to ethereal. And that’s when the movie starts getting slow and tedious.

The Changeover quickly gets bogged down in its paranormalness, like it’s trying to overexplain all of these subtle occult things to its audience that, well, really aren’t that interesting to begin with. What it doesn’t spoon feed it makes up as it goes along, so the audience can never really fully grasp the established rules of the game. And then it just winds down into a neat and tidy ending that, while the stakes are high and the battle is fierce, wraps the movie up exactly as any viewer would expect it to.

And then there’s the forced love story between Laura and Sorey.  Of course, because it’s based on a YA book, there’s an underlying romance. But this one is really awkward, and not just because both parties are varying degrees of witches. There’s no chemistry or cause to the relationship aside from “well, there’s a boy and there’s a girl, let’s have them hook up.” It’s shoehorned in seemingly because the creators feel like it should be there, not because it moves the story at all.

So, basically, The Changeover becomes a typical Teen Paranormal Romance, right down to the pretty faces (Kiwi It-Girl and daughter of the directors Thomasin McKenzie from Leave No Trace has an unsung role) and the hip indie-rock soundtrack (featuring songs from Flume and Death and the Maiden). And, to be fair, I personally am probably not the target demographic for this movie. But, I don’t think The Changeover is going to fill that Twilight­-sized hole in anyone’s life, whether they’re a teenager or not.