There’s nothing in the world better than a horror movie that starts out simple by establishing a setting and a mood and that then spends the rest of its time slowly and deliberately building the threat of whatever’s stalking its protagonist. Horror beasties are best left lurking in the shadows, where our imaginations make them more terrifying than any bit of creature design or special effect ever could, until the tension and pressure of their increasingly overt behavior becomes so great that you have to finally release it by having them do something terrible. A satisfying build to a satisfying freak-out is the recipe that good horror is made from. It’s not so easy a thing to achieve though. There’s a razor’s edge that needs to be walked, a needle to be threaded, in order to build at the right pace and then go off the rails at the exact right moment.
The Boy is the sort of horror movie that does almost everything right, but because it builds at slightly too slow a pace and for slightly too long, its impact isn’t felt as much as it should be when it finally makes things go nuts. Somewhere in the middle of this movie you start to get a little bored, a little restless, which makes the climax feel like it comes just a little bit too late. If you think of a horror movie as being the sort of prank where you pop a balloon next to a person’s head in order to startle them, you want to pop the balloon when it’s as full of air as possible in order to get maximum effect. What The Boy does is slowly and deliberately blow up the balloon until it reaches the point where it looks like it’s going to burst at any second, and then it just kind of lets the air out of it for a while, finally popping the thing when it’s only about half full. Sure, it’s still enough to get a jump from the victim, but if they’d only popped the balloon back when it was at its breaking point, it could have resulted in so much more pants-pooping.
Though The Boy is indeed a haunted doll movie, it’s not the sort of cheesy puppet show that you might be expecting. Instead, director William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside) brings us a film that takes advantage of the fact that the blank faces of old-timey dolls are creepy to look at, but that also understands that once a doll gets up and starts running around, talking, and getting physical with adult actors, things go from spooky to hokey pretty quickly. The story told is that of a young American (The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan) running away from a dark past by moving to the UK and taking a job as a nanny for a rich couple who live on an expansive and isolated estate. The job sounds fine at first, but once she gets there and realizes that the boy the couple wants her to take care of while they leave the country for several months is actually just a doll (and that their real son actually died in a house fire many years earlier), things get real weird, real quick. Not having many options, she takes the job anyway, but she begins to regret her decision once her possessions start disappearing, strange noises begin filling the house, and the doll starts turning up places she didn’t leave it. Suddenly, it becomes clear that the spirit of the dead boy is residing in this doll, and that he doesn’t intend on letting his new babysitter leave her job anytime soon.
Seeing as one of the two main characters in the film is inanimate, the vast bulk of its acting weight gets put on Cohan’s shoulders, and she does fine. Really, the extent of what she’s asked to do is be pretty and vulnerable though, so it’s not surprising that she’s successful in the role. Mostly, The Boy is a very simple story populated with very simple characters, and the extent of what it’s trying to accomplish is to squeeze as many scares out of a blank doll face as possible, so its success or failure is largely put in the hands of its filmmaking. In that respect, the movie is a mixed bag. On one hand, this is the sort of horror picture that introduces every new character with a cheap jump scare and the sort of horror picture that has its main character jolt awake seconds after anything truly interesting happens, revealing that it was all just a nightmare. On the other, it’s also the sort of horror movie clever enough to do things like cast shadows of the rain outside on the doll’s face to symbolize that it’s crying. It leaves you on the hook waiting for something real to happen for a long time, but the stuff you sit through while you’re waiting isn’t necessarily poorly done, it’s just a little empty.
The good news is that once real things do finally start popping off, the chaos is satisfying in a way that you probably wouldn’t expect from a ghost story like this. The third act of this film doesn’t involve covers being pulled off of sleeping people, or glasses being thrown across rooms and shattered by mysterious forces, like most ghost stories do—it has people running for their lives from much more grounded, immediate threats instead. The Boy eventually turns into something that’s far more kinetic, harrowing, and heart-racing than movies like this tend to be, which comes as a very welcome change of pace. If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s that it has a really fun third act that goes out on a high note. You should go into it fully expecting the journey to that point to be a bit of an endurance test though. All in all, one usually does much worse when it comes to January horror releases.
