"So, like, you're from Europe?" asks Ethan. Despite his talent for spouting disarming bits of folksiness, the fact that he's a mere mortal is a non-starter for "casters" (magic users) like Lena and her cane-wielding, cravat-wearing uncle Macon (Jeremy Irons), who vows to keep the two apart.
The true problem is that when Lena turns 16 (a long hundred-plus days away), she's scheduled to be claimed by either the light or the dark side of magic — a fairly arbitrary event, and something that only female casters have to deal with, for some unspecified reason. The fate of the world is also involved, of course, since Lena's mother, Sarafine, is a powerful dark caster, and her forces are marshaling against Macon's.
This all leads to some truly satisfying scene-chewery from Irons as Macon forbids Lena to see that boy again (and again), even if there are only so many times a variation on that scene can play out before Irons' delicious Southern accent starts to wear. Emma Thompson, too, gets in on the act of overacting with relish as the town's most conservative churchgoer; the malevolent Sarafine possesses her, and she and Macon have it out good in a not-so-subtle scene in one of the town's churches.
Tone in Beautiful Creatures is a strange thing to keep track of; see above as regards camp, teen melodrama and social critique. While Ehrenreich and Englert fall in love in one movie and Irons and Thompson magically and verbally spar in another, Emmy Rossum and Viola Davis occupy individual universes of their own. Rossum, as Lena's seductive cousin already claimed for the dark, isn't so much chewing scenery as alternately screaming at or making out with it, while Davis balances the camp as a friend of Ethan's mother, the only person truly still looking out for him.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer might be an apt comparison, given its appetite for banter, pop-culture references and the supernatural as metaphor for various coming-of-age struggles, but unlike that cult favorite, Creatures can't quite manage to tame its disparate parts into a single experience.
The resulting mishmash is a lot like Ethan himself — full of aspirations, good intentions and eagerness to charm its way into your heart, even as it trips over itself. Creatures bogs down when it yet again rewrites its sometimes confusing mythology, and when its plot meanders waiting around for the days to count down to Lena's claiming — it's less ticking clock than sleepy swamp-gator lumbering — but the movie is at least savvy enough to circle back regularly to Ethan and Lena. The scenes where it's just the two of them talking and connecting as real people glimmer with a magic all their own.