Review by:
Andrew Welch

Hot on the heels of the Twilight movies, Beautiful Creatures marks the first installment of yet another supernatural teen series making its transition to the big screen—but “beautiful” is the last word I’d use to describe it. Adapted and directed by Richard LaGravenese from a book by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, this mostly comes off as cheap and derivative, the product of market research more than a well-thought-out story in its own right.

At the heart of the film is Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), a smart, well-read high school junior who doesn’t fit in with the self-righteous Bible-thumpers surrounding him in the small town of Gatlin, South Carolina. That explains why he falls for Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), the new girl in town and niece of Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons), the town’s mysterious shut-in. She is rumored to be a Satanist, but that, it turns out, is just an exaggeration; she’s really just a garden-variety witch, or “Caster,” as they prefer to be called in this film. She’s 15 when the movie opens, with her sweet 16 is on the horizon. Some girls are lucky enough to get a big party or a new car on their sweet 16; for Lena, however, that’s when she’ll either become a good witch or a bad witch. Talk about drawing the short straw.

The villain of Beautiful Creatures is Sarafine (Emma Thompson), Lena’s mother. She’s convinced Lena will come to the dark side, just like Lena’s cousin, Ridley (Emmy Rossum) did—but Macon begs to differ, hence all the brouhaha. One would think it would be fairly easy for Lena to decide which way she’ll go, except that female Casters don’t get to choose; Fate does that for them. The guys, on the other hand, can bat for both sides, morally speaking. That’s supposed to explain why Macon, who hasn’t always been such charmer, is fighting so hard on behalf of Lena. None of this makes any sense though, which is the main problem with Beautiful Creatures; we never understand the world it’s set in.

Regardless of what you think of them overall, the Harry Potter films (not to mention the novels themselves) handled world-building pretty effectively. The earliest installments stuck closely to Harry’s side, and because of that we always had someone with whom to identify as we learned about Hogwarts and the way J.K. Rowling’s version of magic worked; Harry was just as in the dark as we were. Ethan has that same function in Beautiful Creatures—but this isn’t really his story, it’s Lena’s. When he’s not onscreen, we’re more or less adrift in a world governed by rules that aren’t explained to us. The Casters have a vast history, as evinced by the massive Caster library that we later discover is hidden beneath Gatlin and, possibly, the entire country—but how does their world work? Why are only the female Casters subject to fate? Outside of being bad, what’s the big deal about Sarafine? In Harry Potter, we understand that Voldemort isn’t just a bad wizard; he’s the Hitler of the wizard world. In Beautiful Creatures there’s no sense of a greater threat, or of Lena being groomed for a grand destiny. Without any discernible ground rules to govern the world the film creates, nothing ultimately seems to matter all that much.

Hindering LaGravenese’s film further are the corny, exaggerated performances, as exemplified by the religious fanatics in town, all portrayed with mile-wide Southern accents to go along with their phony Westboro-style fanaticism. But even Ehrenreich, as the down-to-earth Ethan, comes off as a cloying caricature. Wouldn’t it have been simpler for the filmmakers to have cast actual Southerners? Irons and Thompson stick out in particular, their refinement as performers clashing with the potboiler teen love story, their inconsistent Southern drawls not helping their cause. The only performer who seems “natural” in this environment is Viola Davis, herself a South Carolina native. She plays a friend of Ethan’s family who is also the town librarian and (gasp!) a Seer. Her casting strikes the only right note in a film full of severe miscalculations.