Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Film

Abe Portman has told his grandson Jake stories about battling monsters and spending his childhood at “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” at Cairnholm, an island off the coast of Wales. The home’s children and headmistress, Miss Alma Lefay Peregrine, possess paranormal abilities and are known as “Peculiars”. One day, Jake finds Abe dying with his eyes removed. He tells him to go to “the loop of September 3, 1943”.

To cope, Jake begins therapy with Dr. Golan. She encourages Jake’s desire to travel to the United Kingdom for closure regarding his grandfather’s death. On Cairnholm, Jake and his father, Frank, investigate the children’s home. It was destroyed during a Luftwaffe raid, but upon entering the ruins Jake finds the children from Abe’s stories.

The children take Jake through a portal on the island’s coast, and emerge in 1943 with the house intact. Miss Peregrine explains she belongs to female Peculiars named Ymbryne who can transform into birds (in Miss Peregrine’s case, a peregrine falcon) and manipulate time. To avoid persecution for being Peculiars, she and the children hide from the outside world in a time loop she created, set to September 3, 1943, and accessible only to Peculiars. It allows them to live the same day repeatedly and avoid aging as long as they stay inside it.

Jake meets the other children, including aerokinetic Emma Bloom. Jake is a Peculiar like his grandfather, and can see the invisible monsters from his stories, called “Hollowgasts” (or “Hollows”). They are disfigured Peculiar mad scientists who killed an Ymbryne in a failed experiment to harvest her powers in an attempt to achieve immortality. Led by shapeshifting Mr. Barron, they hunt Peculiars, primarily children, to consume their eyeballs. Mr. Barron and some of his colleagues consume enough eyeballs to become Wights, regaining a visibly human appearance apart from milky-white eyes.

Wounded Ymbryne Miss Avocet arrives, explaining that Barron assaulted her in her January 2016 time loop at Blackpool, England, killed her children, and is trying to repeat the failed experiment using more Ymbrynes. Jake returns to 2016, to find that an elderly man has been killed by a Hollow, so goes back to the portal to warn them that the Hollow is near. He is followed by an ornithologist who is actually Mr. Barron in disguise.

Barron had tried to extract the location of Miss Peregrine’s loop from Abe, but his hungry Hollow companion Malthus killed Abe before he could do so. He then posed as Dr. Golan, encouraging Jake to go to the island so he could lead him to the loop. Taking Jake as a hostage, Barron forces Miss Peregrine to trap herself in bird form and takes her to Blackpool, leaving Jake, the other children, and Miss Avocet as prey for Malthus and the other Hollows.

Malthus kills Miss Avocet, but Jake and the children escape just as the Luftwaffe raid destroys the house, killing Malthus. Without Miss Peregrine to reset it, the loop closes, leaving them stuck in 1943. Salvaging a sunken ocean liner, RMS Augusta, that Emma has used as a personal hideout, they travel to Blackpool and enter its January 2016 loop. They fight and destroy Barron’s Wight and Hollow allies, and rescue Miss Peregrine and other captive Ymbrynes. When the last remaining Hollow arrives, Jake avoids it, and it instead kills Barron, then is killed by Jake.

Jake says goodbye to the children in 1943 while he stays in 2016 and goes to find Abe, who has not yet been killed since Barron’s death in early 2016 has erased his later presence in Florida. After telling Abe his adventures, Abe gives Jake a map of international time loops. Jake serves in World War II, and eventually reunites with his friends in 1943. Jake, Emma, Miss Peregrine and the children journey to seek a happy time loop.