"The Boy" (2016) d/ William Brent Bell

We last touched upon one of director William Brent Bell's films when we tackled his The Devil Inside (2012) four years ago. While that film dealt with the sexy subject of Satanic possession, tonight's review deals with an elderly British couple and their young son, and  by "son", I may actually mean creepy lifesized porcelain doll, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The film stars Philly native, Lauren Cohan, who you will probably recognize from her role as Maggie in the wildly popular Walking Dead tv series or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which I've still yet to sit through. I'm in no great hurry to see any superhero stuff, thanks.  Her co-star Rupert Evans, was also in Hellboy (2004) and provided voice work for the uber-mint and equally difficult video game, Demon's Souls, in 2009. Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle flesh out the supporting cast, as Lauren's aging employers. It all starts like this...


"Go ahead and interrogate him concerning the stack of Hustler's I blagged from under his bed..." 
Greta (Lauren Cohan) is a young American girl who's just escaped a smothering boyfriend in the states and accepted employment as live-in nanny to the young son of two mysterious pensioners (Jim Norton, Diana Hardcastle) in a big old creepy estate in the British countryside, only it seems he's passed away years ago, as evidenced by the gravestone bearing his name (Brahms, of all things) on the property, leaving the couple to dote endlessly over a realistic porcelain substitute, as if it were their late son himself. Zoinks, Scoob. She's given a list of do's and don't's before they beat a path to the exit, seemingly for a vacation from their own quirky regimen of bedtime story reading and pointless dinner plate setting for a doll. Luckily there's Malcolm (Rupert Evans), a horny delivery boy willing to shed light on the Heelshire family manias, helping the young woman to forget the relationship mistake she's distanced herself from, in the process.
 

"Fight through the tears and tell me where Geppetto touched you, Brahms..."
Interrupting the strange phenomena she's experiencing in the foreboding darkness of the house (shoes gone missing, the doll seemingly moving from room to room on its own, children's voices, etc. ), is the arrival of aforementioned ex, Cole (Ben Robson), who's successfully stalked his former flame directly to her current place of employment. Meanwhile, the vacationing Heelshire's mail off a letter to their son, before walking into the incoming ocean tide together in a suicide pact. To compound matters, Cole makes the scene with intentions of dragging his ex-girlfriend back to America, whether she agrees to it or not, and her interaction with the surrogate boy only further infuriates him, to the point of getting rough with Malcolm, and even raising the doll violently by the legs into the air, and...you'll want to see where this all ends up for yourselves.


"...and right about here is your nasopharyngeal tonsil."
Bottom line, after the big reveal, which I wont be revealing here, mind you... I was reminded more than once of glorious similar plot devices from made-for-television classics dating back forty or more years, and I like that kind of prompting when I sit down to watch horror moves. I like it a lot. I'm rarely so careful as to avoid spoilers around here, but I'm maintaining a conscious effort to leave all the watching up to you cats out there. If you're anything like me, you'll appreciate the lengths this one goes to deliver quality atmosphere and tension throughout it's run time. For that, I think Three big ones is a fair assessment of the material under the wop-roscope here tonight. Recommended.


Porcelain privilege: He's a lot whiter than you are.