I suppose it’s not worth burying the lead: I didn’t like The Boy. I could be cute and I could savagely stick it to this movie, but at the end of the day it really isn’t worth that level of vitriol. The only problem is that it isn’t worth really any amount of praise either.
One of the key problems with The Boy is that it starts with a, shall we say, novel-enough premise. The story concerns a woman named Greta (Lauren Cohan) who takes a job in England watching a young boy who, well, isn’t a boy at all.
The boy in question, Brahms, is a life-size porcelain doll, whose parents (Diana Hardcastle and Jim Norton) have created a strict regimen for their son. If the regiment is broken, Brahms gets cranky.
Naturally, Greta doesn’t believe this so when Brahms’ parents leave, she throws routine out the window. Then a curious thing happens. Brahms gets cranky, but less in a Chucky-The-Killer-Doll kind of way and instead acts more like the spirits in the first half of Poltergeist (the original, of course). He’s almost banally mischievous as opposed to all out evil.
This movie isn’t nearly well-paced enough to pull that kind of slow build up off and when the building up is finally about to reach its zenith, the result is a head-scratching ending sequence. The parallels to films like Poltergeist are the real problem with this movie. The script, scribed by Stacey Menear, appears to have been cobbled together from a collection of other horror films.
Among them are such noticeable similarities to: Robert Wise’s The Haunting, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Steve Miner’s Friday the 13th Part 2, Todd Holland’s Child’s Play and Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact.
Menear’s script comes across as less like a Tarantino-esque nod to all of these movies and really just a mish-mash of clichés knocking into each other. Director William Brent Bell has handsomely put the film together.
He clearly knows how to frame a shot and move a camera, but there is really nothing he can do with this script or really even with the actors. The movie starts as if though it’s already running on fumes and it never gets more energetic.
It’s paced so languidly as if the filmmakers are aware that the best way to view this film is on a Sunday afternoon, being rerun on TNT or TBS. Most of the plot devices aside from the ghost story are obvious as well. Brahms’s namesake evokes painfully obvious soundtrack choices.
The love story involving Greta and the delivery man (Rupert Evans) is telegraphed from the first five minutes and features no surprises. In regards to that subplot, you could watch the introductory scenes, guess how that storyline is going to play out, and you would probably be right.
Movies like The Boy are the hardest kind of movies to review. They aren’t so terrible that they deserve a royal beating, yet there is very little to find that engaged the audience. Even the worst movies provide audiences with the opportunity to snicker and laugh at the failure being put on screen.
These types of movies just leave you sitting in the theater, slouched in your chair, waiting for the film to end. I think this perfectly sums up my experience of seeing The Boy: during the course of the film a theater patron’s phone rang and they answered and quietly explained to the caller that they were in the movie.
Normally, I hate when there is any distraction intruding on my viewing experience. However, I would not have minded had the person just taken the call anyway and continued their conversation aloud.
Last year, our Feature’s editor gave me a lot of guff for giving another possessed doll movie, Annabelle, a positive review. That was just a fun, goofy popcorn movie. All The Boy had to do was reach for that same height. Unfortunately, it just couldn’t get there.
Brian Laughran
Editor-in-Chief
About Post Author
