THE BOY

Reduced from a stormy relationship with a violent and obsessive man, young American Greta Evans wants to leave her turbulent past behind and decides to abandon Montana to accept a job in England offered by the Heelshires, an elderly couple from British aristocracy. The job is very simple: move into the enormous family villa located in the desolate English countryside and take care of their little boy Brahms. Everything seems normal, except that the two spouses have a sinister and ambiguous appearance and, above all, their son is not a child like the others, but a doll with somatic features very similar to humans. The situation worsens when the young American does not respect the rules left by Mrs. Heelshire to make Brahms happy, thus starting a series of sinister events inside the house. Thus begins a twisted and captivating story that sees Greta accompanied by Malcolm, the handsome food deliveryman at the villa. Everything can be said about William Brent Bell, except that his talent is natural, one of those precocious and evident from his first works. The American director, on the contrary, has cultivated his skills over the years and improves film after film, not without paying the price of inexperience as happened with the modest and immature "Stay Alive". Since the 2006 film, however, Bell has come a long way and two titles of no small success have arrived such as "The Other Face of the Devil", a rather mediocre found footage horror film but with great box office success, and "The Metamorphosis of Evil" in which Bell's artistic maturation shows considerable progress and also a propensity to confront different subgenres of the genre. A propensity made even clearer with "The Boy", whose story seems to be a clear homage to old-fashioned ghost stories with at the center of the scene one of the figures most exploited by horror and capable of always transmitting so much suggestion and unease: the porcelain doll. But if with "The Boy" you expect a film about cursed/killer dolls in full swing, you will be disappointed. Forget Chucky from "Child's Play" and all its derivatives and get out of your mind the malevolent toys of "Puppet Masters", "Dolls" and "Demonic Toys"; in this film the doll is just a decoy in a surprising story in which nothing is as it seems. The first part, to be honest, does not encourage much to continue watching as Bell seems to limit himself to doing the homework with the insertion of all the typical elements of classic horror films, those with gothic and decaying atmospheres: the country mansion with ancient furniture and full of secret passages, the couple of decadent elderly aristocrats and the usual artifices to create tension such as floor creaks, distant voices and sudden openings of doors. A set that, combined with sometimes very slow rhythms, makes the story predictable and places the audience in the uncomfortable position of those who always manage to be one step ahead of the events. Fortunately, "The Boy" is not just that and the screenplay, written by Stacy Menear, finds the winning idea to give life to a plot twist useful to start a second part with dynamics very similar to slasher movies where the certainties built previously are swept away, the rhythms become vertiginous and the dose of action also increases. Interesting also the way the character of Greta, played by "The Walking Dead" star Lauren Cohan, is approached, all focused on the loss of her child in the womb and the consequent desire for motherhood that finds a backlash in the hate/love relationship with the doll Brahms. Too bad the same does not happen with the rest of the characters, Malcolm above all, relegated to the role of simple pawns functional only to the development of the plot and little else; this also greatly affects the performances of the various Rupert Evans, Ben Robson and the duo Jim Norton - Diana Hadcastle, the latter in the roles of the mysterious and unsettling Heelshire spouses. "The Boy" is, in the end, a successful film for the most part and marks a further step forward for a growing director and capable of varying from one stylistic register to another with ease and without effort.