An invisible boy. A teenage girl who can manipulate air and another who has fire at her fingertips; two young twins with Medusa-like power and a very young girl with Herculean strength; a child with an unusual green thumb, a boy whose body is a beehive, and a young girl with a giant mouth and sharp teeth in the back of her head! Such are the characters theater audiences meet in director Tim Burton's “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children,” based on the novel by the same name written by Ransom Riggs. Silver screens playing this film are rich with magical visual sequences and fascinating, er, peculiar, characters.

The story centers around Jake Portman, a teenage boy who grew up listening to his grandfather Abe's tales of his unique childhood fighting monsters and being schooled on an island off the coast of Wales for “peculiar” children during World War II. Jake is very close to his grandfather although there is a rough period after Jake is laughed out of school when he shares Abe's stories and photos of the children at the school.

One day on his way to his grandfather’s house, Jake receives a frantic phone call from his grandfather. Apparently Jake's father has taken Abe's gun. How can Abe possibly fight the monsters without it? Jake, thinking his grandfather is suffering from dementia, asks if he's taken his meds. Abe hangs up. Jake arrives at the house and entering the front door he sees the place has been ransacked. Moving through the house to the back door it appears as though Abe's house has been burgled. But where is his grandfather? Jake calls out to his coworker who drove him there and is waiting in the driveway. He asks her to call the police. She comes back to see what's going on and says she has a .38 in her car. As the woman goes to fetch it Jake sees the fence in the backyard has been broken through — and walks through the gaping hole in it into the forest beyond.

“Find the island. Find the loop to Sept. 3, 1943. The bird will explain everything,” says his grandfather, who Jake has found lying on the ground badly injured — and missing his eyes. Jake looks up and sees his co-worker, and a tall monster looming behind her. Jake cries out to her — she whirls around and begins shooting wildly ... but at what she hasn't a clue. And Jake, well, Jake begins to wonder if the stories his grandfather told him weren't true after all.

Nightmares are Jake's constant sleeping companion in the weeks after Abe's death. Jake's parents, Frank and Maryann, hold a surprise birthday party for him hoping to cheer him up a bit. At the party, Jake's paternal Aunt Susan gives him a present from his grandfather found while packing up Abe's house. It's a book of Emerson's selected works. Inside is a postcard signed by Miss Peregrine and postmarked Cairnholm Island. Jake now wants to travel to the island to look for the school. His parents aren't too keen on the idea, but the psychiatrist they've been sending Jake to believes traveling to the school/orphanage on the island will help Jake to separate fantasy from reality.

Jake and his father travel to Wales. On the boat trip out a large peregrine flies above them as they make their way to the island. After checking in at the only B&B on the island, Jake is eager to find the school. Frank pays a few local teens to take his son to the other side of the island.

When he finds the school, it has been destroyed. Bombed by the Germans in 1943 says the innkeeper when Jake returns. Still, the next day he goes back to the school and meets Emma who calls out to Jake, but calls him Abe. Emma leads Jake to a cave where there are several of the children his grandfather talked about — Jake recognizes them from the photographs. Emma tells him he must come with them. He starts to follow, but changes his mind. However the next day he goes back to the cave and travels through the time loop.

When Jake meets Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) he learns she, too, is a “peculiar.” Peregrine explains that peculiars are the result of a recessive gene carried down through families that can skip generations. Her peculiarity is being an ymbryne (im-brin) giving her the power to control time by creating time loops and the ability to become a bird. A peregrine to be precise. And Miss Peregrine is nothing if not precise

“Because our abilities don't fit in the world we live in, we create places like this where no one can find us,” Peregrine says. “We can create a time loop, which preserves the last 24 hours.”

Jake doesn't understand why he is on the island on Sept. 3, 1943, it's not as if he is a peculiar. But, like his grandfather, he is indeed. How else could he travel through the loop — or see the monsters?

Jake learns he is to take over his grandfather's job of protecting the peculiar children by hunting the Hollows, the monsters, Jake can see. The Hollows were peculiars themselves once, but their desire to control time and become immortal drove them to conduct an experiment in which they connected themselves to a captured ymbryne, to absorb the bird's powers. But that didn't happen. Instead their eyes were burned out to glowing white orbs and the bird killed. The Hollows are led by Barron (Samuel L. Jackson), who is also a shapeshifter. The Hollows now hunt peculiar children for their eyes and ymbrynes in the time loops all over the world to continue their experiments.

Will Jake accept his fate as his grandfather did before him? And if he does, how will he save Miss Peregrine and the children on Cairnholm Island? What will happen if Miss Peregrine is captured and not at the school at the precise moment she must reset the time loop? Jake Portman's adventure and its outcome await this week at The Harbor Theatre. The film opens tonight, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m.

And, as is the case in most book to movie transformations, Burton has changed a few things. But for those who haven't read the book, this film will provide an entertaining couple of hours.

The theater is located in the Meadow Mall at 185 Townsend Avenue in Boothbay Harbor.