"The Boy" entertains for its self-conscious stupidity

There were 2 types of horror flicks shown in our cinemas last week: a home-invasion thriller, "Berkshire County" (2014, USA) by Audrey Cummings and a creepy-doll chiller, "The Boy" (2015, USA) by William Brent Bell. (We might as well note that these are independently-produced flicks, having modest budget and stars, and a small-scale release.) My favorite sub-genre is the home-invasion one, but I'll write about the second film instead. With lots and lots of horror movies already made in the past (and still being conceptualized or made in the present), it's hard to doubt that the biggest challenge for a director/writer is how to make his/her particular work original or, at the very least, stand out among the rest, considering the fact that the horror genre is very much prone to rehashing the same ideas, elements and tricks over and over, ad infinitum, in whatever style and presentation. (Though come to think of it, which genre isn't?) And "The Boy", by all means, isn't the kind of work that brings us to an unfamiliar and unexplored territory. Bad news, right? 

But there's a good news: And that is, "The Boy" simply doesn't have the pretense to flaunt that it's a one-of-a-kind piece of filmmaking. In fact, it's modest enough to let the viewers feel that it shouldn't be taken seriously. A kind of laughing at one's own stupidity or silliness. And that's where the fun of the film lies. If we were to be really harsh, we could've asked, "How can you tell that a film knows that it's stupid?" There's no need to think twice that "The Boy" is anchored on a pretty silly premise: A grieving English old couple hires an American nanny for a life-size china-doll, whom the couple regards as the embodiment of their 8-year-old son who died in a fire many years ago. Not that we put in jest the elements of grief and tragedy in the story;it's just that the whole idea is rather apt for a sitcom than for a horror story (even for a drama, just scrap off the conceit of a tragedy). The director and the writer (Stacey Menear) relish their material's inherent no-brainer attribute that the film actually ends up being simply entertaining. Never mind that the description of being "entertaining" might be problematic for a film that was supposed to scare the hell out of us. To say that there was an intended irony here might be reading something between the lines when one shouldn't have bothered. 

Part of the fun of watching "The Boy" has to do with figuring out who or what exactly Brahms (the name of the doll) is. This is what makes the movie somehow interesting, enough to keep the viewers on their seats for most of the thankfully-average running time, especially if we are to notice that for the most part, the film's action is just confined within the couple's spooky countryside mansion. For the task of providing more "backstory" to Brahms, the filmmakers have relegated that to Malcolm, the couple's grocery man, played by Rupert Evans with just the right mixture of charm and mystery to make us care enough to listen to what he's telling. Plus, he also makes for an interesting diversion to the nanny's otherwise isolated life in the household. As a matter of fact, all the actors here have done a fairly commendable job of making us stick with the goofiness and absurdity of the entire situation. To be mentioned are Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle as the couple Mr. and Mrs. Heelshire, who, despite being in just a few scenes, manage to let us in to their grief and sadness, and of course Lauren Cohan as Greta, the movie's heroine, whose able transition from confusion to fear to maternal caring makes her compelling and sympathetic enough given the flimsiness of the material she's working on. Most of the movie involves scenes of Greta being alone inside the mansion, with no other companion except the doll itself, making her literally a woman in danger, as creepy things start to happen in the house (those familiar scare tactics, so no need to specifically enumerate them). And the movie, fair enough, is able to generate palpable suspense out of these scenes. The jump scares may not be as high voltage as those in James Wan's "The Conjuring", but at least we're not altogether unaffected. 

If the movie had only been meaty and complex enough to match the onscreen talents. As it is, the actors have just given so much for so little. 

And again, thanks to the "The Sixth Sense" syndrome, "The Boy" joins the bandwagon of horror films that couldn't resist the temptation to put a third-act "revelation", thinking that it's always a cool idea to let the audience realize that all that they saw and heard beforehand wasn't really as it seemed to be. It's as if these filmmakers didn't have full trust in the strength of their initial story that they felt it should always be mandatory to introduce a left-field arc to hook the audience even more into the story. Well, some "twists" do work marvelously (Alejandro Amenabar's "The Others"), but there are some that are plain ridiculous (Alexandre Aja's "High Tension"). True enough, the one in "The Boy" is something that may very well induce us to utter, "You gotta be kidding me!" Instead of bringing the story into full circle, it skews it even further. On a positive note though, the "revelation" here comes off as amusing in that it clearly references an iconic villain in a classic and influential slasher film (I was actually thinking of 2 examples) and thus changing the pace of the movie. What we have thought all along to be the workings of some supernatural entity becomes a grounded cat-and-mouse chase in the end. Kind of a cheat, but entertaining still the same. 

The nanny initially thinks that she's into some kind of a stupid joke in William Brent Bell's "The Boy"