Spellbound is a movie on Netflix that has some serious talent behind it: it is directed by Vicky Jensen, who also worked on Shrek, produced by Linda Woolverton, known for Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and features songs by Alan Menken, the legendary composer of Disney classics like The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, and Aladdin. The film also boasts a star-studded cast including Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman, and Javier Bardem. Despite not being a family-friendly remake of the Hitchcock classic, Spellbound tells the story of a princess dealing with her parents being transformed into monstrous creatures, creating an interesting and engaging narrative.

Overview: The story revolves around Princess Ellian, a 15-year-old who is secretly running the kingdom of Lumbria. Only she and the palace staff know that her parents, King Solon and Queen Ellsmere, have turned into giant creatures after encountering the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness. They now resemble nonhuman monsters and display minimal traces of their human selves. Despite their destructive and animalistic behavior, there is hope for their eventual intelligence restoration, especially with actors of Kidman and Bardem’s caliber involved in the project. However, finding a solution to this predicament becomes a pressing issue, as movies rarely depict characters simply living with their problems indefinitely.

Spellbound will lead viewers on a journey to discover the resolution to Ellian’s family crisis. Ellian, along with her loyal Ministers Bolinar and Nazara, has thus far kept the military leader, known as The General, uninformed. As the plot unfolds, viewers will be curious about Ellian’s pet, Flink, a charming purple gerbil with comically oversized eyes, known for stuffing its cheeks with random objects. While initially a non-speaking character, Flink eventually undergoes its own transformative curse. In this enchanting world, curses are common, but the potential for adorable plush toys seems endless, offering a whimsical touch to the story.

Ellian consults a pair of ambiguously gay oracles (Nathan Lane and Titus Burgess, so maybe they’re not so ambiguous) and ends up schlepping her beastly parentals back to the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness (excellent black metal album title, BTW) to embark on a quest to cure them. And like all fantasy quests, she and Flink and the beasts Solon and Ellsmere must overcome a series of obstacles that prompt character development at the same time they’re visually nifty and/or action-packed. Making the journey more difficult is The General, who trails Ellian, and doesn’t want to listen to anyone and believes the monsters should just be shipped outta here and forgotten, like we Americans do when we sell our garbage to Canada. And it turns out that the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness is the kind of place full of the most dangerous thing ever that Yoda warned us about: only what you take with you.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Spellbound is better than Wish but definitely sub-Frozen and occasionally Shrekish and Encantoesque, with a visual aesthetic like another Netflix animation, The Sea Beast.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: I know Zegler can capital-S Sing (note: Bardem and Kidman, not so much), but Nathan effing Lane can capital-S Sing and be funny as hell at the same time.

Memorable Dialogue: Best decontextualized line: “We’ve been out-Flinked!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Spellbound tends to draft on the high-pedigree work of its creators’ filmographies, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – the film has high standards for writing and visual design, and is therefore chock-full of inspired eye candy and reasonably sticky songs. But you know this formula very well by now, and savvy moviegoers’ sixth sense for the rhythms of this type of story will buzz moments before a character is about to belt one out, and you can’t help but step on some of the more obvious jokes. So you take the good with the bad: yawnworthy body-swap subplots and overly plaintive singing are balanced out by the frequently lovely and creatively rendered animation, and a message about family dysfunction that lightly challenges traditional notions of what “family togetherness” means. 

Speaking of messages, less reputable critics will reveal what this movie is essentially “about” even though it’s a third-act spoiler. I will hereby dance around it by saying it’s somewhat progressive without being particularly revelatory. My snarky commentary about problems and solutions above is, upon further review, only partly true; one major problem Ellian and her family faces has a solution and another one really doesn’t, and the movie is heavily engineered to assert that that’s perfectly OK. 

I sometimes struggled with Spellbound’s tendency to make straight text out of subtext, and to hammer us with ballpeen-to-the-skull symbolism: There’s a sequence where Ellian and her monster-parents venture through a Cavern o’ Visual Metaphors where positive thoughts manifest as iridescent blue blobs and negative thoughts are red zappy bolts, and where too many of the latter attract what seems to be a physical manifestation of Eternal Darkness, a perpetually whirling tornado of black circles that can envelop a person in its depressive dervish. (There’s even a scene where one of the characters exclaims, “I thought it was a metaphor!” when first witnessing the literal monsters the king and queen have become.) Everybody watching will absolutely Get It whether they want to or not – but they’re also just as likely to be entertained by this smartly above-average family-friendly endeavor.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Spellbound is more enchantment than curse.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.