This film is a visual extravaganza : it’s Tim Burton meets Harry Potter with Jim Carrey thrown in (who incidentally met and surpassed my expectations). He is excellent as the evil Count Olaf and his appearance, physical acting and character fit the absurd and eerie yet beautiful art-direction of this film perfectly.

Lemony Snicket (voice of Jude Law) is the narrator of the story in which the three ‘Baudelaire’ children are orphaned when their parents are killed in a mysterious fire at their home. They are put into the care of a relative they never knew they had, Count Olaf. Olaf is deliciously evil and set on inheriting the Baudelaire fortune, but the children are no ordinary children: Violet, the eldest, is rather good at inventing things, Klaus devours books on almost every topic and remembers everything he reads. The youngest child, Sunny, likes to bite things with her razor-sharp teeth.

Sunny was by far my favourite… a toddler with an adult-like face, occasionally emitting incoherent gurgles which are subtitled and extremely funny. The film is indeed a series of unfortunate events in which the children keep escaping and falling back into the evil clutches of Count Olaf and meeting more ‘relatives’ they never knew they had, such as Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly) and Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep).

I thoroughly enjoyed the film until the last five minutes in which I felt everything was rather hurriedly and loosely wrapped up, leaving me with quite a few questions. I won’t specify here as I don’t want to include spoilers in this review, but I suspect it’s one of those open endings that smacks of Lemony Snicket’s Another Series of Unfortunate Events.

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