The Boy **
Dir: William Brent
Bell. With: Lauren Cohan, Rupert Evans, James Russell, Jim Norton. 97 mins.
Cert: 15
With the measured
suspense of The Witch and 10 Cloverfield Lane ascendant within
genre cinema, the crash-bang-wallop merchants launch a counteroffensive. This
intrinsically mediocre non-chiller transplants the hackneyed methods of 2014’s Annabelle to the English countryside,
dispatching an uptight Lauren Cohan to the residence of the haughtily eccentric
Heelshires to nanny their “son” Brahms – a child-sized porcelain doll. A vessel
for everyone’s grief, Brahms is intended as creepy, yet in these cheap-looking
surrounds, he rather resembles a stray Harry Hill prop; endless restless POV shots
can’t transform a tchotchke into a credible threat. Elsewhere, gimmickmonger
William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside)
has but careworn gotchas to offer, and he exhausts those long before the
indifferently staged stalk-and-slash finale. These movies need new toys to play
with.
The Boy is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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