“The Boy” has a solid cast, cliche script
By Keith Ariaz
The horror genre is responsible for some of the worst movies ever made. When they’re good, they’re really good, but when they’re bad…they’re really bad. “The Boy” winds up somewhere in the middle.
The creepy doll category isn’t a stranger to the world of horror, but somehow, no matter how many times you see them, they still manage to send the smallest of shivers down your back. And it’s no different for the protagonist of the film. Greta (The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan) is a young woman from America who travels to the UK to nanny for the Heelshires, an elderly couple (a convincing Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle) looking for someone to watch their 8-year-old son Brahms. You can imagine Greta’s surprise when she arrives to find that, rather than watching a boy, she is instead expected to watch a porcelain doll. At first she thinks it’s a joke, but quickly realizes her employers are serious.
They give him hugs and kisses goodnight. They help him say his prayers. He has piano lessons and is even served three meals a day. To them this is all normal, but Greta (and the rest of us) are downright creeped out. After the Heelshire’s leave for an “overdue” vacation, Greta is left alone inside the rather large and spacious home with only the doll to keep her company. The second they leave, strange occurrences begin to happen. Objects are stolen, footsteps are heard, a child cries into the late hours of the night and Brahms appears in places he shouldn’t. Greta begins to question her own sanity, but it soon becomes apparent that something far more complicated and strange is going on.
As interesting and original as this film tries to be, it never gets its feet off the ground, despite the cast’s best efforts. It starts off interesting enough, but the second things go bump in the night it quickly becomes another standard PG-13 horror movie hoping to make a quick buck over the weekend. The script, written by Stacey Menear, leaves more questions than answers and falls victim to an endless amount of clichés. Her script relies too heavily on jump scares, not to mention the fact that it uses multiple dream sequences. To be fair, director William Brent Bell creates a few scenes that form a slow sense of dread and terror. He uses some fantastic camera angles that had me slightly gripping my seat’s armrests, but they’re quickly ruined by standard cliché tactics.
The movie manages to get a few things right. First off, the setting of the film is fantastic. It provides the perfect atmosphere for this type of film and almost looks like something that was frozen in time, a piece of gothic history that refused to move on with the rest of the world as it moved into the 20th century.
But the real joy of this film is the cast. Lauren Cohan does her best to make us believe the story and she succeeds. Even though Brahms is only about three feet tall, Lauren Cohan makes us believe he’s the most terrifying thing to ever exist.
Malcom (Rupert Evans), the Heelshire’s delivery boy, is only in the film to provide some sort of romantic storyline for Greta and tell her about Brahms “mysterious” past. His character may be pointless, but Evans plays it well and actually manages to pull a genuine laugh or two out of you.
The Heelshires themselves, Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle, sell the part of two people who believe a doll is actually their son. The premise could have easily come off as a huge joke, but the two veteran actors pull it off. It’s a shame the cast’s talent had to be wasted on such a paint-by-numbers script.
“The Boy” isn’t a good movie, but it isn’t bad, either. And since I’m being honest, I’ll admit it does deliver one solid jump scare that scared the blue out of my jeans. Bottom line, with all the movies that you could be watching right now, you could do a lot worse than this one.
— “The Bottom Line” My name is Keith Ariaz. I’m a journalism major. When I’m not making movies of my own you can usually find me watching them in a theater.