After that opening plunge off the cliff, Louis (Aiden Longworth) revives in the morgue after being dead for two hours. His resurrection, and the seaweed monster occasionally lurking around his coma ward, both suggest a supernatural angle to the story. When Louis' mother Natalie (Sarah Gadon) says he's an angel, she certainly seems to mean it literally. But a lurking, leering detective (House Of Cards' Molly Parker) thinks Louis is just a garden-variety child-abuse victim, especially after Natalie's estranged husband Peter (Aaron Paul) goes missing right after the cliff incident. And Dr. Allan Pascal (Fifty Shades Of Grey co-star Jamie Dornan) writes Louis' survival off as an unusual but plausible case of pediatric hypothermia closely resembling death. That still leaves Louis in a coma, though, with strange things happening around him.

"He's a liar like all men are, and he plays the same games they play."

The weirdest element, though, is Louis himself. He's a supercilious, hateful kid whose favorite phrase is a dismissive "blah blah blah," summing up everything he considers boring. He constantly, aggressively mocks his child psychologist, Dr. Perez (Oliver Platt), as fat and ugly. He crushes his pet hamster to death on-screen, justifies it as his right as its owner, and receives a new one. And he spouts twisted gender generalizations, with all the self-righteous surety of childhood. "He's a liar like all men are, and he plays the same games they play," he says of Pascal. Louis Drax embodies the worst fears of men's rights activists: Louis has clearly been raised as an unquestioning man-hater by an unchecked parent with an agenda. It falls to Dr. Pascal to defend male honor: "We're not all bad. Not completely," he tells Natalie. It's strange that Louis Drax doubles as #NotAllMen: The Movie. It's stranger still that the film barely mentions how Louis was indoctrinated into so many terrible beliefs, apart from grotesquely wallowing in the results.

That cavalier attitude toward cause, effect, and connection runs throughout the film. In a series of pre-coma scenes, Louis experiences a suspicious series of childhood accidents, unloads some of his more outré opinions on Dr. Perez, deliberately starts a vicious fight between Natalie and Peter, and spends loving, supportive time with Peter alone. But it's hard to place any of this in time. Eventually, a sort of natural narrative order suggests itself, but it's a bumpy road to an uncertain destination, frequently interrupted by shifts from fairy tale metaphors to scenes that don't involve Louis at all.