I couldn’t believe my ears. Angel Studios came out with a movie that wasn’t a xenophobic evangelistic pile of trash? And it’s somehow good?! Yeah, I had to see this for myself.

Sketch tells the story of Amber, a young pre-teen played by Bianca Belle. Her mom recently died, and she’s not taking it well. It doesn’t exactly help that her dad (Taylor, played by Tony Hale) is keeping himself busy trying to sell the house, which means he isn’t there to help his kids through all this upheaval. He’s obviously trying, don’t get me wrong, but the stress of raising two kids and selling the house on top of coping with his own grief is too much for the poor guy to handle.

Thus Amber and her big brother (Jack, played by Kue Lawrence) are left on their own to try and process everything that’s going on. The difference is that Jack takes after his father and tries to bottle up his emotions, leading to predictably unstable and unhealthy results. Amber, on the other hand, is a very different case.

Amber has retreated into her notebook, with an obsessive-compulsive need to draw what she’s feeling. And most of the time, she’s feeling angry and depressed and disturbingly hostile to everyone around her. In the drawings, these feelings are expressed as monsters. Particular highlights include the “eye-ders”, little spider creatures that steal people’s belongings; “Dave”, a giant blue ball that stomps on people and sprays glitter everywhere; and of course we can’t forget the monster that punches your stomach hard enough to cause death by copious external bleeding — that one’s known as “Evil Amber” (played by Leigha Hancock).

Before we get to the basic thrust of the plot, let’s take a minute and unpack what we’ve got so far.

Yes, the movie is explicitly about grief, but the messaging could apply just as well to anger, anxiety, depression, and any other kind of negative emotion. This is very much a film about finding a creative outlet — drawing, in this case — as a healthy means of expressing those emotions and working through them. The only real problem here is that Amber is taking it to an unhealthy extreme.

Yes, her drawings aren’t hurting anyone (and it’s pleasantly surprising to see a school counselor take that attitude, post-Columbine). Even so, Amber isn’t just using her notebook as an emotional outlet — she’s using it to isolate herself from everyone else. More to the point, if she’s only wallowing in death and despair and antipathy without any kind of hope or compassion to balance it out, that’s not exactly healing. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Anyway, it turns out that Amber and her family just happen to live near a lake with magical properties that are never explained because nobody cares. (Wow, the second time in two movies, that’s a weird streak.) In fact, it’s Jack who first discovers the magical properties of the lake: It can heal wounds and fix broken things. So Jack gets the bright idea of dumping in his mother’s ashes to try and bring her back to life. But before he can act on that goddamn awful idea, mistakes happen and Amber’s notebook falls into the lake instead.

Now, based on what’s happened so far and the established rules about this magical lake and how it works, you’d expect that the notebook would somehow be repaired or restored in some way. That’s not what happens. Instead, the lake releases all of Amber’s drawings and brings them to vivid life. I know. I don’t get the logic either. But again, it’s not like anyone cares. What’s important is that now we’ve got a town overrun by mischievous, potentially homicidal monsters as conceived and drawn by a ten-year-old girl. Whoops.

Regarding the CGI, it was a stroke of genius to have monsters that looked like a child’s drawings. For one thing, that must have saved a fortune in the VFX budget. Nobody cares if the monsters look photo-real — if anything, that would only take away from the intended effect.

(Side note: The film was made with a reported budget of $3 million. Impressive.)

More importantly, the monster designs all strike a marvelous balance. In the hands of any other filmmaker or studio (Blumhouse and A24 immediately spring to mind), this could’ve been a hard-R movie with gross-out violence and terrifying scares. But the creature designs seen here bring the monsters down to a PG level without compromising the creepiness and terror that make them a legitimate threat.

I might further add that these monsters are literally made of the stuff they were drawn with. This means we get monsters that explode into glitter or chalk dust or molten crayon wax when they get killed off. It gives a neat visceral punch to the action scenes without getting into anything explicitly gory. Even better, all the clouds of multi-colored dust comprise a trippy kind of aesthetic that contrasts nicely with the rural forest setting of this particular town.

The end result is a movie loaded with set pieces that are scary enough for adults, but harmless enough for kids. Even better, we get child characters that sound authentic without ever being depicted in a condescending or phony way. Major kudos are due to all the child actors — Kue Lawrence turns in an especially heartbreaking performance, and Bianca Belle might just be the most dynamic young actress I’ve seen since Chloe Grace Moretz was her age.

Kudos are also due to Tony Hale, here making good use of dramatic chops like I haven’t seen from him since Nine Days. Such a nuanced and layered depiction of a grieving single father. I love how the film explores all these themes of creativity and working through emotions, all done in a nicely empowering way that will resonate with viewers of all ages. Even better, the lean 90-minute runtime is packed with enough twists and turns, with some impressively clever setups and payoffs, to keep the plot moving and engaging.

So, are there any nitpicks? Absolutely.

I know I gave due praise to the child characters and how they’re all depicted in a nicely sympathetic way. And then there’s Bowman, played by Kalon Cox. Yes, it helps a great deal that Bowman makes himself legitimately useful at times. That’s a huge part of why Bowman never quite crosses the line into being an irredeemable little shit. But gods above, there were so many times when his asshole comic relief schtick tried my patience.

No, the weakest character in this film is easily Liz, played by D’Arcy Carden. She’s Taylor’s sister, and also the real estate agent trying to sell his home. And for so much of the movie, Liz is so intensely focused on selling the house that she barely seems to acknowledge Taylor as a blood relative. Hell, she barely even mentions her niece or nephew — i.e. the main characters — nor does she trade a single line of dialogue with either one.

It’s halfway through the movie when Liz first broaches the topic of her sister-in-law’s death. And she gets to be the one to suggest that maybe Taylor could do more to help his kids through their grieving. As if Taylor hadn’t spent half the running time obsessively trying to close a real estate deal, to the point where she’s aggressively making Taylor feel like an unwelcome nuisance in his own home. And by the way, it’s not like Aunt Liz would be completely powerless to help Amber and Jack manage their feelings, but there’s no indication that she’s ever even tried to offer any such help.

Liz and Bowman are both wretched comic relief characters, but at least Bowman came in clutch when it really mattered and he could sell the occasional face-turn. Liz can’t even manage that much.

Then we have the Big Bad. Granted, “Evil Amber” works beautifully as a thematic foil for Amber, and the film does a fine job establishing her as a huge climactic threat. Trouble is, the villain is so much better in setup than payoff. By virtue of the film’s PG tone, the villain is fundamentally incapable of doing what everybody says she can do. And because she’s been so thoroughly handicapped, she’s surprisingly easy for our heroes to defeat.

Last but not least, there’s the app. The mid-credits stinger is a commercial — complete with the actors addressing the camera out of costume and character — shilling an app that can take kid’s drawings and animate them. I hope you’ll all forgive me for being skeptical about the intentions and potential abuses inherent in an app aimed at kids. Especially coming from Angel Studios, the company notorious for its shady “audience participation” schemes. (“Pay it forward”, anyone?)

Moreover, the tie-in app will only age Sketch in a way the film doesn’t deserve. This feels like the kind of movie that parents and kids can share with each other for generations. It’s scary but never traumatizing, funny but never annoying (though it comes close at times), and a hundred percent sincere without ever talking down to its audience. It’s a creative film that celebrates creativity, empowering in its depiction of how art can be used to bring people together and heal emotional wounds, and how it can be abused to do the opposite.

My congratulations to Seth Worley, the writer/director/editor who crafted one hell of a feature debut. I doubt this will be a turning point for Angel Studios and a sign of how or whether they’ll do more secular work in the future, but I’d be delighted if that’s the case. Regardless, this one gets a strong recommendation. Check it out.