Escapism is at its best when it allows audiences to step away from the troubles of their lives. To make away to a magical land where fairy dust extends the power of flight, kids stay kids forever and crocodiles do away with malevolent hook-handed nemeses. Come Away is no such escapism. Scrambling up the mythology of Sir James Matthew Barrie and Lewis Carroll, the film geared predominantly towards children attempts to tell a magical realism-inspired, wait for it, meditation on grief and losing a child…intended for children.

If you’re scratching your head already, you aren’t alone. Existing in this unfortunate middle ground between children’s cinema and adult sensibilities, Come Away has the distinct misfortune of not catering to either age group. Too childlike and thematically threadbare to really appeal to adults and dealing in far too much trauma, grief and heavy themes for the kids in the audience, the film is a cauldron of weird ideas that never seems to understand who its audience is. I mean there’s a scene where a 11-year old looks to overdose on her mother’s morphine. After being explicitly told never to touch mommy’s medicine. She then proceeds to trip balls. It’s worth repeating at this point: this movie is for children.

Like most movies geared towards the wee ones, Come Away is big and broad but not without its small charms. Combining fantastical elements and humanist drama, the film manages some moments of childlike wonder and tricksy visual flair, which makes those moments where it seems like the budget ran dry all-of-a-sudden seem all the more out of place and bizarre.

Director Brenda Chapman, who was famously last seen being fired off of Pixar’s Brave, was poised to make a long-awaited return to the big screen that would also double as her first foray into live-action. Chapman cut her teeth in the golden age of Disney, working as a writer on Beauty and the Beast, Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, before directing Dreamwork’s Christianity-laced The Prince of Egypt. But none of Chapman’s prior story-lord experience seems to have informed the misguided script from Marissa Kate Goodhill, whose only other credit is a 2013 short film called Lost and Found.

Working from Goodhill’s script, Come Away follows the Littleton family, woods-dwelling English folk that consists of patriarch Jack (David Oyelowo), a sea-vessel replica craftsman with gambling debts; Rose (Angelina Jolie), the kindly mother who takes to the aforementioned morphine when tragedy befalls her family; David (Reece Yates), the eldest child with a bright path ahead of him; Alice (Keira Chansa), waffling between her love of playing outside with her brothers and the pull of being a “proper lady” ; and Peter (Jordan A. Nash), a spunky and at times rebellious youngster who fancies himself in the making of Pan.

Each do what is asked of them, with the young performers providing exactly the wide-eyed largesse expected of children actors. Featuring a restrained, or some might prefer the term sedate, performance from Angelina Jolie, who doesn’t exactly sleepwalk through the role, though it is hard to finger exactly why an actress of her caliber is involved at all, Come Away always seems a bit hard to piece together, all the way down to the casting. Which is a shame because there is a kernel of a good idea here, it just didn’t quite pop.

CONCLUSION: There are moments where things connect in ‘Come Away’ but, more often than not, lack of tonal cohesion leaves this quasi-Peter Pan/Alice in Wonderland mashup a total head-scratcher. Both too dark and grief-laden for kids and too narratively basic for adults, Brenda Chapman proves the distinct challenges of live action children movies.