--- ---  # Tim Burton Loses the Plot in _Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children_ ## Video: This Video Is No Longer Available [Watch (HLS stream): This Video Is No Longer Available](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/fKodeUO6.m3u8) (0:10)  _Published 2026-06-23. The movie's second half is impossible to follow_  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Sep 29, 2016 10:05 AM UTC  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Sep 29, 2016 10:05 AM UTC In a world that now seems like fantasy but which was once very real, [Tim Burton](http://time.com/4201681/moscow-artist-tim-burton/) was one of our most imaginative and uncompromising filmmakers–one who could wrest vivid, dreamy details into a cogent story. Burton still has his imagination, as his adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ young-adult novel [_Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children_](http://time.com/4259092/miss-peregrine-peculiar-children-trailer/) proves. The picture is laced with gorgeous, haunting touches: two young teens, feeling their way toward romance, drift to the bottom of the sea for an innocent rendezvous aboard a sunken ocean liner–its dining room, draped in mossy rust, is still populated by skeletons sitting primly at their fully set tables, waiting for a meal that will never arrive. Burton revels in his trademark gruesome wit too: a radiant little girl looks perfectly normal from the front–but at the back of her head lurks a second mouth, rimmed with menacing, pointy teeth. _Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children—_a mystical fantasy in which a pipe-smoking headmistress, played by the always alluring Eva Green, cares for a group of specially “gifted” children who survive eternally by reliving a single day in 1943–is in many ways the perfect repository for Burton’s own gloriously peculiar gifts. It’s far less garish than some of his recent monstrosities, like [Alice in Wonderland](http://time.com/4310913/rare-collection-of-alice-in-wonderland-books-to-go-on-sale/) and Dark Shadows. And he’s alive to the charms of his performers, including the gangly, winsome Asa Butterfield (best known for [Martin Scorsese](http://time.com/4457404/jonah-hill-martin-scorsese-wolf-of-wall-street/)‘s Hugo) and the young English actor Ella Purnell, as a lighter-than-air miss kept earthbound only by her strappy lead shoes. But what’s happened to Burton’s gift for storytelling? In the movie’s second half, it’s impossible to follow the story’s gnarled-vine logic. The picture’s elegance devolves into chaos, a mess of noisy, cluttered action sequences, as if Burton didn’t trust us to sit still through something quieter, moodier and more controlled. _Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children_ could have been a return to form for Burton, but he loses his sense of direction halfway through. If only he could find his way back to his wild bread-crumb trail, the one that guided him so ably for years. 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