Poor young Freddie Highmore is really up against it in the film version of The Spiderwick Chronicles. He’s stalked and attacked by a whole mob of ghouls, goblins and trolls, led by a gruesome shape-changing ogre of distinctly evil intentions. Not only that, he’s the only one in his seriously endangered family who can see and hear these hideous creatures, residents of a realm hidden from ordinary human perception.

No wonder the poor kid’s beside himself. Okay, so really he’s just playing identical twins, thanks to modern movie magic, but this is still serious stuff we’re talking about. This must be the most frightening challenge he’s faced in movies since he was elbowed offscreen through most of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Johnny Depp, playing Willie Wonka as a hybrid of Michael Jackson and Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour. Now that was scary!

But Freddie has his hands full in this one, too, thanks to an antique book filled with dangerous, jealously guarded and sought-after information about that secret realm compiled by his great-great Uncle Arthur early in the last century. Young Jared Grace finds this dangerous volume in an attic-office of the rural Victorian manse where he, his mother (Mary-Louise Parker), brother Simon and sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger) have just moved.

Relocated from overpriced Manhattan after mom and dad’s divorce, the kids are feeling varying degrees of disgruntlement, with Jared the most sharply and deeply dissatisfied. Brother Simon doesn’t “do conflict” and, as a budding naturalist, is fascinated by the opportunities to explore the local fauna. (And is he in for a surprise!)

Guarding the precious, perilous book is a house goblin named Thimbletack, a computer creation voiced by Martin Short. (The Industrial Light and Magic imagery and characters are appropriately charming or repulsive.) And outside, gathering his repulsive crew together to strike at Jared’s family and get his paws on that book, is the ogre Mulgarath, given a witty and menacing human incarnation by Nick Nolte in a brief turn before this character assumes computer-generated monster mode.

Director Mark Waters (The House of Yes) keeps things moving along briskly, cramming a lot of plot into a trim 92 minutes. He and his three screenwriters—one of whom is the prominent indie director, John Sayles—had to compress and cut many of the characters and narrative from the five children’s books by Terry DiTerizzi and Holly Black, and it shows. Some backstory and explanations have gone missing and the whole thing can seem a little too rushed.

One youngster of about the same age of Jared/Simon complained to me as we exited the screening that the books’ dwarves and their lair were gone from the proceedings. And just why Nick Nolte is so keen on getting Uncle Arthur’s book and killing all the fairies—who scarcely figure in all this—wasn’t really clear to me.

Spiderwick is less than enchanting, but it’s mostly deft and exciting, nowhere near as plodding and confusing as the recent movie version of Phillip Pullman’s young adult novel, The Golden Compass.

Even my complaining young informant at the theater liked it, more or less.