Brahms: The Boy 2 is the 2020 sequel to the 2016 horror film The Boy. I saw The Boy. It was alright. A woman running away from an abusive relationship becomes nanny to a china doll and has to follow a list of rules for taking care of him. The original film presents as a standard haunted doll story, in the vein of Annabelle. Spoiler, it’s not a haunting. The sequel is about a family who move to the neighbouring guest house of the original manor following a traumatic event and who discover the doll. This one presents like a pseudo possession of the family’s son as he gets more enamoured with the doll.
2020 STX Films
Given that most people who would have watched this film presumably watched the first one, I was surprised that they kept up the pretense of a haunting after the doll was introduced. Not only did they do the first film’s tricks of having the doll move around seemingly by itself, the sequel doubled down and had its eyes and head moving on screen. It was a bit of a lame effect and actually made him less scary in my opinion. Still, it was proceeding as to be expected. For people who hadn’t seen the first film, it looked like the little boy was getting possessed and for those that had, it seemed as though the boy was being corrupted by the same villain from the original film.
It was about 30 minutes from the end that things went ever so slightly off the rail. I guess in an attempt to double down on the ‘its not actually supernatural’ twist from the first film, the filmmakers decided to make it actually be supernatural in that… the doll has some kind of weird shrivelled burnt thing inside of it. This… thing shows up about ten minutes from the end? The only information we get is that apparently it’s been living in the house as the doll for centuries and every family it becomes part of, it drives them insane. There’s no actual explanation given for this (or why the doll has the same name and a great resemblance to the character of Brahms from the first film, if its apparently been there for years).
2020 STX Films
The ending completely undoes the film. There’s no psycho murderer like the first one but there’s no actual ghosts or monsters either? It is literally just a movie of a doll being vaguely creepy for an hour and a half. You can’t even draw any excitement from the slowly corrupted (possibly possessed?) boy, Jude as… you don’t see him do anything. He’s implied to have killed a dog and there’s a moment involving another boy and a sharp stick, but that one comes off as an accident. Other than that, the only hint we get is that the boy starts dressing like the doll and looks a little pale in a few scenes (and, be honest, this film is set in England. Pallor isn’t something we tend to get concerned about).
2020 STX Films
This film makes zero sense. The plot is a mess, the characters aren’t especially interesting (credit to the actors though, they were one of the few good things in this car crash) and the cinematography choices were just bizarre.
The Boy wasn’t an amazing movie but it did something reasonably original and the characters in it were at least engaging. Seriously, give me a wall dwelling murderer with mummy issues over endless shots of Katie Holmes being scared any day. The sequel wasn’t even clichéd, which I could forgive if it made for an enjoyable movie, it was just nothing. It was all quite dull build up to a payoff that never came.
2016 STX Entertainment
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