THE BOY (William Brent Bell). 97 minutes. Opens Friday (January 22). See listing. Rating: NN
This lame horror movie is, for what it’s worth, not as lame as director William Brent Bell’s other lame horror movies, Stay Alive and The Devil Inside. That’s not saying much, but that’s sort of my point.
Where Bell’s other work has a tendency to be incompetently staged and almost insultingly stupid, The Boy – written by Stacey Menear – establishes its premise clearly and plays reasonably fair with the viewer. If there’s not a single moment that feels original or inventive, well, at least there isn’t a single moment that makes you angry either.
The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan plays Greta, a young American who takes a job as a nanny in a remote English country house only to discover her new charge is a life-sized creepy doll named for her employers’ lost son, Brahms, who perished in a fire three decades earlier.
An hour or so of spooky noises and fakeout jump scares later, the truth is revealed, and the movie segues into a different mode of horror – one where, at least, things can happen.
Cohan holds the screen nicely, and Rupert Evans underplays nicely as her de facto love interest, a village grocer who provides handy dumps of exposition between awkward passes.
It doesn’t amount to anything, and it evaporates the second the lights come up, but it’s still better than The Forest.
