Review of Sketch

Sketch (2025)

Directed by Seth Worley

In theaters now

Last night, I got to watch Sketch with a group of friends. Star and producer Tony Hale is a favorite of mine: I love how he talks about being present and fighting anxiety. He also plays awkward and kind in real and beautiful ways.

Sketch follows Amber, the young daughter to Hale’s character Taylor, whose mother died recently. Amber works out her emotions by drawing terrifying-looking monsters due to a bullying situation. These monsters later come to life and wreak havoc on her community. (I’ll let you watch the movie to find out how this happens.)

The special effects were amazing: the monsters looked exactly like Amber’s drawings, including the different textures created by her medium of choice. be it crayon, Sharpie, or marker. The child actors did fantastic jobs, especially Bianca Belle, who played Amber: she expressed a myriad of emotions through even the slightest of facial expressions. The writing at times was a little too on the nose as far as processing emotions, but we live in a time of therapy-speak, so perhaps it’s current. Tony Hale and D’Arcy Carden (who plays Taylor’s sister) did lovely jobs as well: they balanced the scary parts in the movie with humor at just the right points. I’m giving Sketch 2 out of 5 cups of coffee, which means I liked it. 

This movie has several jump-scares which caught a few of us last night, so it might not be a great movie for young children who are easily frightened. 

Although the message of the movie is how to deal with difficult emotions, I really appreciated a different message : children figuring out how to handle a challenge on their own. A growing number students either demand answers from adults or use AI for school assignments, and studies are showing that AI is destroying critical thinking skills. It was refreshing to see a movie in which children used primarily their own critical thinking skills (with only a very occasional prompt from an internet search and no input from adults), trial and error, and some common sense and empathy, to help each other out come up with and execute a plan to destroy the monsters.

Go get ‘em, young folks!  You can do hard things.