Fleeing an unhealthy relationship, Greta (a pretty but perfunctory Lauren Cohan, TV’s The Walking Dead) takes a babysitting job overseas in jolly old England. An older couple, the Heelshires (played by Diana Hardcastle of Good People and Jim Norton of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs), are overdue for a much-needed holiday and need her to watch their young son, Brahms.
And oh, he’s such a doll — an actual, literal, life-sized doll they treat as flesh and blood, despite its creepy face. Rather than hightail it with an “Um, I think I left my socks in the States, BRB,” Greta stays — an admirable work ethic for a millennial, if also ragingly stupid.
More Michael Myers in visage than Mortimer Snerd, Brahms is “playful,” according to Mrs. Heelshire, which is quite the euphemism for “homicidal.” Nevertheless, Greta tends to her to-do list of daily duties with Brahms, from waking him at a precise time and reading him poetry to tucking him in bed with a goodnight kiss. (Insert your own wood joke here.) Not on the Heelshires’ numbered, typed tally: second-guessing every strange sound heard or unusual flash caught by peripheral vision in the Heelshires’ palatial estate — two things on which our au pair understandably spends an excessive amount of time.
Overcoming its thought-free title, The Boy exceeds expectations, as long as they’re set on low. After all, it is the work of William Brent Bell, director of the much-loathed The Devil Inside. Here, he toils not in the gutter of found footage, but the Gothic governess ghost story, except this modern update … well, I’ll never tell. I will say that the movie has more going on than first appears, especially for PG-13 studio fare, and that the built-in creepiness of Brahms boils to a twist that, while may not be dictionary-definition original, at least qualifies as unexpected. When’s the last time that adjective applied to mainstream horror with a teen-friendly rating? —Rod Lott