Parents' Guide to Wrinkles the Clown

It starts like a horror movie about a nightmare clown crawling out from under children's beds, but turns out to be a documentary that holds many fascinating truths. Wrinkles the Clown, directed by Michael Beach Nichols, in fact becomes a chronicle of how folklore is made, how misinformation spreads, and why certain stories burrow so deeply into us. Nichols is especially good at showing how an urban legend gathers force through repetition, rumor, and fear, and the film keeps widening until it becomes less about one creepy figure than about the human need to invent, embellish, and pass stories along.

Wrinkles himself is the film's best trick. He begins as a deeply unsettling image, the stuff of nightmares really, all sad mask and polka dots and that now-famous under-the-bed footage, but the closer the documentary gets to him, the more it opens into bigger questions about parenting, discipline, performance, and the scary stories adults use to teach children lessons. Nichols doesn't pretend to have a neat answer for why some myths catch fire and others do not, and that uncertainty gives the film a lot of its fascination. It's incredibly entertaining, but also genuinely thoughtful, and that combination makes it well worth your time.