Following her mother’s accident, eleven-year-old Mildred (Nell Fisher) is temporarily placed into the care of a father she has never met—faded magician Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood). The two don’t hit it off straight away, and in an effort to bond with Mildred, Strawn agrees to take her on a camping trip to search for the elusive Canterbury Panther.
★★★☆☆
The film’s cinematography is impressive—it captures the sweeping landscapes of Aotearoa in a way that both highlights their vastness and admires their details. On a smaller level, the opening credits showcase all the treasures and curiosities that Mildred displays in her room, setting a tone of warm curiosity. It’s a shame the rest of the film is unable to maintain that.
One of Bookworm’s main issues is that all conflicts are resolved almost as soon as they have been established. Mildred wants to spot the Canterbury Panther, and they do. Their camera is missing, and they near-instantly retrieve it. She and her father argue and get separated, but immediately find one another again. This continues to the extent of Strawn suddenly mastering magic in a way which, if you have been watching so far, feels impossible to believe. No plot is drawn out for very long, resulting in an uneven pace with both long stretches with seemingly no plot at all, and times where the viewer is pelted with B-plot after B-plot. The whimsical tone and epic hunt for a panther, as promised by trailers, quickly falls to the wayside.
Perhaps plot faults could be excused if the characters were more engaging, but they’re not the most strongly-written. Mildred is clearly intended to fit a gifted child or child prodigy archetype, a character which has been popular in family films for the last decade or so and can be written effectively. However, Mildred falls short of her predecessors. Despite the film’s title and surface-level focus on her being a ‘card-carrying bookworm’, we only see Mildred’s precocious status when she namedrops one or two books early on, and reels off a sparse few facts. When compared to the likes of The Young And Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2011) or Matilda (1996), Mildred’s bookishness comes across as merely a trope rather than an integral aspect of her character.
There are elements of the film with merit—Mildred and Strawn’s relationship develops nicely, going from Mildred’s resentment at Strawn’s lifelong absence to something approaching a truce. Strawn, while initially awkward around her, figures out how to step up as a father when they end up facing dangers greater than the Canterbury Panther. He is allowed to have the same fears and insecurities as Mildred—it is a dynamic which acknowledges that they are both only human. He has made mistakes as a father, but the writing emphasises that everyone has their pitfalls. In addition, Wood’s performance as the faded TV magician is an enjoyable watch reminiscent of his role as ex-band-member Todd Brotzman in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency—someone both deeply tired and still, ultimately, well-intentioned.
The Verdict
The actors bring their best to a story that could have benefited from more development and depth. Bookworm toes a line between whimsy and realism that it never crosses in either direction. Despite its impressive cinematography it does not seem to know what it wants to be, too slow for an adventure epic and too surreal to be a grounded family story. Although it can be added to the ranks of ‘child prodigy’ films, it is not the strongest among them.
Words by Casey Langton
Bookworm is available on digital platforms now
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