The Boy

The Boy is a supremely silly and not-at-all effective thriller.  It's about an elderly couple who live alone in a stately Gothic house with a creepy porcelain doll that is modeled after their eight-year-old son who died in a fire 20 years ago.  Yes, the doll looks creepy.  Now if the movie could think of something interesting or scary to have happen around it, we would be in business.  We might even have a real movie. 

The couple in question are Mr. and Mrs. Heelshire (Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle), whose gloomy old house is located in the middle of nowhere in the British countryside.  The only company they have, aside from each other and the doll used to remember their son, is a grocery delivery man named Malcolm (Rupert Evans), who stops by quite a bit to drop off food.  He must have been doing this a long time as the film opens, as he doesn't seem to find the couple's behavior surrounding the doll the least bit strange.  The Heelshires suddenly decide to leave on holiday, so they must hire a nanny to look after their "boy", whom they call Brahms.  The woman they pick is Greta (Lauren Cohan from TV's The Walking Dead), an American woman who is living in England in order to escape an abusive ex-boyfriend.  When she arrives for the nanny job, she is naturally confused by their request to look after this strange doll while they are away.  But, she needs the money to start a new life, so she takes it. 

She is given a long list of rules that she must follow in order to keep Brahms "happy".  These daily tasks include reading to him at a certain time each day, to playing his favorite music.  Before the Heelshires leave, they ominously inform her "be good to him, and he'll be good to you".  Naturally, as soon as the couple is gone, Greta puts Brahms away, and tries to go about her own business.  But, while she is alone in the house with the doll, strange things start happening.  She can hear the sound of someone moving about in different rooms of the house, or her clothes, jewelry and shoes will suddenly go missing, and show up somewhere else.  Strangest of all, the doll never seems to be in the last place she left it.  With Malcolm's help, the two do a few simple experiments, and come to the conclusion that the doll does seem to be moving around on its own.  After this, Greta starts pampering Brahms, much the same way the Heelshires did, and treating it like a living person.  Is she losing her mind?  Is the doll truly alive?  Both are intriguing questions, neither of which are explored all that deeply in the underdeveloped screenplay by first-time writer Stacey Menear. 

The Boy is what I like to call a "Step One" movie.  It has all the set up and early elements that could make an effectively creepy story.  That's Step One.  Step Two would be building on that, creating some actual tension, and rewarding our early curiosity with satisfying answers.  The movie never even bothers to make it to Step Two.  Instead, it simply wastes our time with scene after scene of Greta walking around dark hallways, thinking she heard something, when it turns out to be nothing, or it's just Brahms sitting on a bed, staring at her.  Even worse, the only scares that we do get for a majority of the film are of the "it's only a dream" variety.  The movie cheats time and time again by having something actually happen, only to suddenly cut to Greta springing up in bed in fright.  That's one of the most tired cop outs in the horror genre, and the fact that it's the only source of scares this movie can rely on seems to hint at desperation on the part of the filmmakers.

While we wait much longer than we should for something to actually happen, we do get to admire that the set design of the house itself is well done, and the performances really aren't even all that bad.  In her first lead role in a film, Lauren Cohan does at least create some sympathy for her character in her performance.  But so what?  We have come for thrills, and the movie offers us none.  And when we finally do get some answers in the last half of the movie as to what is really going on, they play like something out of a cheap slasher movie rip off from the 1980s.  And I'm not talking about the big-name slashers like Freddy, Jason and Michael Meyers.  This is like something out of one of those countless low rent knock offs that used to clog the horror aisle in video stores back in the day.  It's a ludicrous conclusion that not only refuses to give us any real answers, but makes even less sense when you think back on everything that happened before it.

As thrillers go, The Boy is about as tame as you can get, and has obviously been designed to sucker money out of some teenagers during a slow weekend in January.  My only wish is that audiences will be able to see right through it, and forget about this movie as soon as possible.  I know I plan on doing just that as soon as I finish this sentence.

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