Since the death of her mother, 10-year-old Amber Wyatt (Bianca Belle) has been bothered by all sorts of dark thoughts. Rather than act on those impulses, Amber commits her most monstrous ideas to a secret journal, purging anxieties from her subconscious though art. The process would be therapeutic, if not for a gnarly twist that releases Amber’s scary scribbles into the real world: marker-drawn hearts with insatiable appetites, a googly-eyed glitter monster on long bendy legs, and swarms of red, arachnid-like “Eyeders.
” With his stellar indie family adventure “ Sketch ,” commercials director Seth Worley has come up with a creative — and highly teachable — concept for his feature debut, using imaginative visual effects to impart a valuable lesson about dealing with grief and other strong feelings. The live-action/CG-animated hybrid channels the spirit of “Jumanji,” by way of “The Babadook,” but with something important to say. Once Amber’s doodles get loose and start to terrorize the locals, the young “morphan” (her word for a child whose mother has died), older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) and their still-grieving dad Taylor ( Tony Hale ) must confront the feelings they’ve been avoiding.
If not, their unresolved emotions are liable to consume them entirely. The trouble starts when Amber draws a sinister version of herself stabbing one of her classmates — a neighbor named Bowman (Kalon Cox), who’s not so much a bully as he is just plain obnoxio.