MashGet

The prospect of a child’s death is so awful that to broach it in a movie or a book requires a special measure of caution and sensitivity. Or so you might think. But at least since Victorian novelists from Charles Dickens to Louisa May Alcott dispatched under-age angels to heaven on cataracts of tears, dead or dying kids have provided ready catharsis and money in the bank. In modern day commercial fiction, and in Hollywood movies, childhood mortality is handled with sometimes cynical care. It can authorize righteous, vengeful violence or else reawaken the dormant possibilities of melodrama. Nothing else quite guarantees the same queasy intensity of feeling.