I just saw The Book of Henry, and I feel like I've been mugged by a Decemberists song. I am confused, annoyed, and exhausted—and that doesn't mean I don't recommend it. I actually want everyone to see The Book of Henry, just so I don't have to be in this club by myself.

I will confess I knew nothing about it going in. I had heard the trailer was berserk, but extreme reactions about movie trailers are nothing new. I had come across vague tweets about how bananas the movie was, but everybody knows not to put too much stock in what one hears on Twitter. Still, I was intrigued, and I decided that if I was going in, I was going in blind.

Allow me to spoil it all right now, and to assure you that knowing all of the plot details will not diminish your enjoyment of this movie in the least. It is all in the execution, and the execution is fuuuuuucked uuuuuppp.

Colin Trevorrow's first movie Safety Not Guaranteed was about a genius manchild. The Book of Henry is about a genius childman. Henry is the smartest kid in all the land, which is apparently The Land of People Who Don't Give a Fuck, because nobody's put him into any kind of special school or even an accelerated study program. No, he's just there in his regular fifth-grade class, giving long speeches about His Legacy, and wasting time that his classmates could probably spend learning how to add or whatever. And then he goes home and makes cupcakes for his little brother (played by the kid from Room) with some kind of Rube Goldberg Easy Bake Oven in a treehouse he built. He does a thing where he opens a package of soap flakes near a fan and makes the house look like it's snowing, and his mom comes home from work and loves it. So just right away: super plausible.

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Also Henry's mother is played by Naomi Watts, and she's put him in charge of her finances. He's in charge of everything in her life, really. She's a waitress, and she lives in a great big house, and she plays video games leaning way forward so you can tell she's really into it. She runs all her decisions past her 11-year-old son, and he gives her good counsel, and then she gets drunk with her fellow waitress Sarah Silverman, who has a flirty, negging-heavy relationship with Henry and a tattoo on her right breast that I think might be lichen.

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Oh, and then next door, there is The Most Beautiful Girl in Henry's Class, with whom Naomi Watts has a secret handshake. Beautiful Girl lives with her stepdad, because her mom is dead and nobody has any relatives you don't see on camera. Beautiful Girl's stepdad is Hank from Breaking Bad, and he's also the Police Commissioner, and he molests her, but he does it in her bedroom, three feet away from the bedroom window of Henry, the smartest kid in all the land. This is a town with no good applicants for the position of parent or Police Commissioner.

So of course Henry knows what's going on, and he alerts the principal, who is played by Tonya Pinkins, because this movie is trying to break me. Or rather, he has alerted the principal, because he bursts into her office and says, "Goddammit, Janice—when the fuck are you going to do something about this?" Principal Pinkins says she can't call the police without hard evidence, even though so far she has seen bruises on this girl and had to pull her out to send her to the emergency room. Remember this. It will come back later.

Okay, so obviously Henry calls Child Protective Services, whose number he has written down in his Big Red Notebook, which will also come back later. (He has also written down "*67 makes the call anonymous," which you would think was information he could retain because he is the smartest kid in all the land. I remember what *67 does without writing it down, and I'm dumb enough to have forgotten to keep a receipt for my ticket.) He calls, and they send a person to investigate, and the person does so by coming out to the Police Commissioner's house and asking him, "Hey, are you molesting your stepdaughter? You aren't? Okay, cool," right there on the front porch. And then Henry pulls out the Child Protective Services brochure, and on the back of it is a photo of the guy who came out to investigate, and his name is, like, Steve, The Police Commissioner's Brother. You know how Child Protective Services has brochures, and on those brochures, there's a picture of the smiling face of the guy who's going to do all the investigations, like a realtor ad on a bus bench? Just normal, everyday stuff that we all recognize and identify with.

So then Henry, the smartest kid in all the land, is like, "Well, I guess I'd better assassinate the Police Commissioner." He draws up big elaborate sketches of the town's bridge. He does all kinds of math-y analysis on where a person would need to stand so that their body would fall into the river. He walks right into a gun store and prices sniper rifles.

And then he gets a brain tumor and dies in two seconds.

No, I'm serious.

He has a seizure, and they rush him to the hospital for emergency brain surgery, which isn't successful, and which also doesn't require them to cut his hair even a little bit. So the doctor, who is played by Lee Pace, sits this 11-year-old kid down, and is like: "Well, you're super going to die." And Henry is like, "Oh, is this a neuroblompazoid," or whatever, and asks a million questions about radiation and critical structures, because somehow he's gone to medical school in between making cupcakes, managing his mother's investments, and trying to murder Hank from Breaking Bad. So anyway, Sarah Silverman kisses him on the mouth and then he dies, and the second smartest person in all the land becomes the smartest person in all the land, and that's Naomi Watts—and Naomi Watts is an idiot.

Also, throughout all of this, the school is preparing for a talent show. Just hang on to that fact. It's coming back.

Before dying, Henry has told the kid from Room to make sure Naomi Watts reads the Big Red Notebook. So the kid takes a peek at the Notebook, and immediately deciphers it, and says: "Mom, Henry wants us to kill Hank from Breaking Bad." And Naomi Watts says: "Okay, we'll just have to think about that." And then she decides: Yes. Yes, I am going to fulfill the wishes of my dead genius child who was also my stockbroker, and I am going to murder my neighbor. She goes to the safe in her basement, where Henry has left a recorder with tapes of instructions, because he had snuck out of the hospital where he was dying of the world's fastest brain tumor to record them and put them there, and also he had access to a those little answering-machine tapes in a world where people have cell phones. So Naomi Watts follows his instructions and buys a sniper rifle, because Henry has even taught her how to bribe and threaten the guy behind the counter. She does target practice out of Henry's treehouse, which is close enough to her house that she would let her young sons play in it unsupervised, but far enough that the Police Commissioner next door wouldn't hear sniper-rifle target practice.

Okay, so a child molester is about to get shot in the head by Naomi Watts, who's following the orders of a dead 11-year-old. It's time for the talent show! Naomi Watts drives the kid from Room and Beautiful Girl to the event, and once it starts, she sneaks away to carry out the plan. The talent show begins with a rapping ginger kid whose rap ends with "I'm the shiznit" and a mic drop that puts the final nail in the coffin of mic drops, and not a moment too soon. And then a kid burps the alphabet. You know how grade-school talent shows are like that? The teachers and administrators say "We'll just stay completely out of your way," and offer no supervision or guidance at all. "Surprise us, children!"

So then Naomi Watts goes to the treehouse to kill Hank from Breaking Bad at a great distance with a sniper rifle, because she listened to a 90-minute tape from her dead son and now she's in the Mossad. The plan is that she will do a little yoo-hoo whistle into one walkie-talkie, and the other walkie-talkie will be right at the spot on the bridge where Hank needs to stand so he can be shot. Hank is in his study, and he hears a faint yoo-hoo whistle off in the distance, so of course he goes right out to investigate, with his handgun. (Rifle fire: not worth checking out. A whistle in the middle of the woods, which is presumably full of birds: investigate at once.) Naomi Watts aims. Henry is still in her earbuds, giving her motivational messages. But then she slips and activates one of Henry's Rube Goldberg things, which ends up lowering a bunch of Polaroids of Henry from the ceiling. And she looks at those pictures, really looks at them, and it hits her: "I can't do this. Henry, you're a child." So then she runs back to her car, with her sniper rifle in her hands, and this is fine with everyone.

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Beautiful Girl's talent show performance is an interpretive dance. Principal Pinkins watches from offstage, and she sees Beautiful Girl's eyes, and she's like: "This girl is being molested." Principal Pinkins has seen bruises, has sent her to the emergency room, has heard the testimony of the smartest kid in all the land, but it's modern dance that finally convinces her to call the police. And a school principal's description of a talent-show dance performance is sufficient for the police to send multiple cars out to Hank from Breaking Bad's house, sirens wailing. He of course shoots himself, so nice one, Henry.

The kid from Room goes last at the talent show, and everyone's wondering what he's going to do, because that's the way these things work. He comes out in a magician's cape, with a big trunk, and he says, "When I open this trunk, my brother is going to be alive again." And all the teachers and parents are like, "This would never happen in real life," and you're like, "I know, but we're nearly out of here, let's see what's in that trunk." So he says some magic words, and he opens the trunk, and all kinds of soap-flake snow shoots out of it! And also from the ceiling, I guess, because suddenly everyone's covered in it, all the way to the back of the auditorium. And then he looks around to find Naomi Watts, and she emerges from the darkness, and Beautiful Girl comes to live with them, and Naomi Watts becomes a children's book author, which I guess is what she wanted to be all along, and everyone lives happily ever after except Hank from Breaking Bad and the dead genius kid whose special wish was to murder him.

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We are left to wonder whether Henry actually wanted Hank dead, or whether the whole thing was a long con to make Naomi Watts act like an adult for once. But here's the thing: In that moment when Naomi Watts looked at the pictures of young Henry and came to her senses, I actually said "YES!" (Really! Out loud! It was okay because I was the only person in the theater!) Messages are important, and this one is especially resonant at this moment in history. We do not need to follow the instructions of children! We are allowed to be adults if we want to! It is acceptable—proper, even!—to stop going to Disneyland after a certain age! There is something to be said for embracing maturity, for taking responsibility of your own life, even if you have to follow a child's assassination plan for a little while to get there.

Anyway, Colin Trevorrow will direct Star Wars Episode IX, a movie everyone on Twitter will be furious about because some character's laser helmet will be the wrong color, and that's if we're lucky and our game-show host president doesn't get us killed before then. I feel like the central message of The Book of Henry comes just a moment too late.

Go see it. Don't make me bear this alone.

Dave Holmes Editor-at-Large Dave Holmes is Esquire's L.A.-based editor-at-large.

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