Anytime a new movie comes out that tells the story of a possessed toy/doll/dummy/marionette I think of that classic Twilight Zone episode about the Talking Tina doll that got violent when mistreated. It was such a corny tale and yet it has retained its creepiness through the years because of how simply it was presented, taking place just outside of accepted reality and not requiring any gruesome images to get the point across. The best Twilight Zone episodes were like that. They were just real enough to be plausible and just weird enough to scare you.
The new thriller from The Devil Inside director William Brent Bell could have taken some lessons from that tried and true balance. The movie is called The Boy and the boy in question is actually a doll replica of the child an elderly couple (played by Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle) lost in a fire decades before our heroine comes on the scene to “babysit.” Greta (Lauren Cohan) has been hired to watch the doll, affectionately named Brahms, while its parents are away, and she is given some very specific rules to follow lest the child, whose parents recognize is spoiled, misbehave. The whole situation is very strange, of course, but thanks to a grocery delivery man named Malcolm (Rupert Evans), some degree of normalcy is brought into the house as he comes and goes. Plus, Greta has some sort of serious trouble back home and a few months away from the world is just what she needs.
Then things start getting freaky. Greta’s belongings begin to disappear. She gets phone calls with only vague whispers on the other end. She gets mysteriously locked in the attic. Worst of all, Brahms never seems to stay in the place where she leaves him. Greta begins to struggle with the fact that Brahms really may be alive or possessed by the ghost of the deceased child, and if that is the case, the question remains whether he is a pitiable spirit or a malicious one.
There are three sections into which The Boy is pretty evenly divided. The first toys with the idea of whether or not this is a possessed doll story or merely a crazy people story. The second makes the situation pretty clear and deals with issues more psychological than terrifying. This middle section is the best part and is more or less destroyed by the nonsensical climactic third, which takes a few ridiculous and unoriginal turns. I won’t spoil the ending, suffice to say that if you’ve seen the superior ghost movie Housebound, the two pretty much have identical finales.
The trouble with this movie isn’t that it’s boring or anything; I was fairly entertained throughout. The problem is that it’s too unsatisfying. The haunted house style scare tactics are lame and predictable, and any attempts at being a scary movie are altogether abandoned halfway through anyway. So, the people, particularly teenagers, looking for a good PG-13 frightfest may be disappointed by how low-key the whole thing is, and those of us who would actually have enjoyed a more character-driven horror story will be disappointed by how little it delves into its own possibilities. And then the climax comes stumbling into the picture, getting worthy groans from an audience tired of a movie that won’t follow through on anything it starts in desperate attempts to be narratively shocking.
The best thing here is Lauren Cohan who does as good a job as she could with a character that only exists to be scared. She and Rupert Evans are asked to say some very silly things during their “cute” meet-ups and it’s thanks to the actors’ commitment that we somehow aren’t rolling our eyes every time they speak.
It’s Stacey Menear’s screenplay that bogs the whole thing down. It’s too obvious and borrows too much to surprise us. Not to mention that the story is riddled with holes in logic, the least of which is how this Montana girl got an obscure babysitting job in the middle of British nowhere. Things like that go frustratingly unexplained, yet maybe the aforementioned teenagers who haven’t seen The Twilight Zone and Housebound will be just spooked enough to overlook them.
C
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