366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: David Wheatley

FEATURING: Caroline Milmoe, Tom Bell, Kilian McKenna, Patricia Kerrigan, Lorcan Cranitch

PLOT: An orphaned girl is sent to live with her brooding uncle, a toymaker who makes elaborate marionette shows to cow and terrorize the members of his household.

COMMENTS: You have to hand it to the Brits; they just do coming-of-age stories a little bit differently. Here in the States, our budding young women are coping with love and loss at the hands of farm equipment or bee stings. But across the pond, the full flower of the newly mature female is as likely to coincide with psychic revenge upon a distant father or the wholesale collapse of civilization. It’s a whole other ballgame over there. 

Our heroine, Melanie, is coming into adulthood and knows it. Ogling her own youthful, unblemished form in the mirror and comparing it to Boticelli’s Venus, she observes, “Physically, I’ve reached my peak. From now on, I can only deteriorate.” It’s a charmingly lofty and pretentious declaration that highlights her actual immaturity, given her comfortable home and the security of her parents’ oversight. Naturally, it takes their demise in a plane crash (over the Grand Canyon, an appropriately yonic piece of symbolism) to make her realize just how unprepared she is for the adult world. She and her younger siblings are promptly shipped off to a cramped London flat where her foul-tempered Uncle Philip sells handcrafted dolls and wind-up toys in the front and holds oppressive court in the back, demanding total subservience from his mute wife Margaret and her brothers Finn and Francie. Philip is a petty dictator, issuing his cruelties through rigid house rules and cutting remarks. He’s the sort specifically designed to foster rebellion in the young people he despises, and given that Melanie is just starting to come into her own, their collision is inevitable.

The use of the word “magic” in the title implies a fairy tale element that isn’t really the story’s focus. The toys in his shop promise a level of enchantment that Philip is quick to stifle. His peculiar passion is for puppets, which he brings to life as the expression of his cynical view of humanity. That’s where we see the line between childhood and adulthood, between toys as best companions and toys as childish things to be put away. That dichotomy is the story’s pivot point, as Philip repeatedly denigrates Melanie until he finally comes up with a use for her: to play the lead in a re-enactment of the Greek myth in which Zeus rapes Leda under the guise of a swan. When Melanie comes face-to-face with the mechanical bird, it’s the crucial moment when she has to decide if she is interacting with a toy or with the malevolent soul giving it life.

Screenwriter Angela Carter, adapting her own book, has been seen ‘round these parts before—specifically, her reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves. Magic Toyshop similarly explores notions of burgeoning sexuality, both in Melanie’s unsteady flirtation with the roguish Finn and in the strange abuse heaped upon her by Uncle Philip. It’s a powerful simile (far too overt to be a metaphor), although one that is undercut by its sudden and unsatisfactory resolution. Yes, we get the revolution we expect, but with no follow-through. Melanie, who once declared that she had peaked and could only deteriorate, now looks at the flames consuming her world and says, “Everything is lost now.” It’s as though Carter refused to countenance an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after, but can hardly see a world in which anyone lives at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A gorgeous, strange and mesmerizing fairy tale for adults… ‘Toyshop’ is less a film of sexually charged transformations, man into wolf, than one with magical, spellbinding effects…” – Sheila Benson, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)