Take some misfit British kids, outcast from a society incapable of understanding them, add a splattering of magic and menace, and at the centre put a troubled but sincere boy. Write it up as a book, and then make the film. It is, it seems, a very familiar paint-by-numbers formula we have encountered half a dozen times already. Nevertheless Tim Burton’s creative palette has more than enough intensity, saturation, and craziness to make this film look and feel amazing.

The book on which the film is based is itself the peculiar child of American author Ransom Riggs, and for quite a while it cornered the US youth fiction market. At its heart is Jake, a brooding teen who sets off in search of his grandfather’s unbelievable past. A combination of text and original photographs collected over many years, the novel is an unconventional publication, drawing together the real and the imagined; the visually documented and the absurd; the unsettling fiction and the disturbing truths. Into this, Burton throws his own dystopic vision, brought to life by a cast of famous names and newcomers alike. Each character has a story more horrendous than the next: an affliction, a peculiarity or a curse.

Asa Butterfield plays Jake with a serenity beyond his years: he is the outsider who gets caught in a rescuer / victim tug of war during his quest to save the home and its inhabitants. He is quietly controlled and determined, as he tries to maintain his sense of reality amid the onslaught of chaos thrown at him by both the writing and the directing. He is surrounded by the other children, the masked twins (inspired by an actual vintage photograph, with some Greek mythology mixed in), the boy with his own internal beehive, the girl with the hidden extra mouth, and the child no one can see: these are all heavy-handed representations of the psychological, physical, sexual and social angst of the teenager. In essence they are making sure that there is something to which all of us could have related to in our awkward teenage years.

Eva Green does her best Bonham-Carter as Miss Peregrine, the headmistress charged with the care of all these misfits. With a permanently quizzical expression and a penchant for sprouting wings, she dominates whenever she is on screen. She and her peculiars live in a magical time loop, essential to the survival of everything around them. Her brood of kiddies, as well as having their individual oddities to cope with, must work together to prevent the end of their world, each and every day. Only it is the same day, over and over – a day which ends with an impending bombing raid, the magical turning-back-of-the-clocks to avoid certain death, and the looping back to the same 24 hours once more. But if having a beehive in your stomach, being trapped in a Victorian-Gothic asylum in Wales, and being bombed daily by Nazis isn’t quite enough to keep you going, there is also a fascinatingly menacing Samuel L. Jackson leading a gang of the immortal undead who are out to kill any children who are peculiar.

This is a lot to absorb in two hours. And with Burton’s super-saturated style, the story-telling occasionally gets a bit lost within the spectacle. The final act switches from the psychological sincerity of exploring themes of childhood isolation and abandonment, to a generic CGI-fest of escaping the more literal demons. The film explores the same ground as much of Burton’s work: the outsider, the dark forces, the childhood confusions. Visually he has thrown a lot of colour at the screen, and manged to make it land exactly where needed. And peppered throughout the film, there are references to a myriad of other movies: film geeks will go weak at the knees trying to follow the cinematic trail of crumbs. But, while the end result looks astounding, ultimately Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children suffers from its origins as young-adult fiction, and a darker, more adult exploration could have made for a more honest piece of cinema. Perhaps the inevitable two sequels will grow up a little.