Some things are better left alone … – review of the movie “Brahms: The Boy II”

The first part of the series, about an old married couple treating a realistic doll like a son and confronting a babysitter, was not of the highest caliber, but nevertheless held a certain level. There was a disturbing atmosphere, a decent acting, a famous actress in the lead role (Lauren Cohan), and in the end a quite clever twist, playing on the nose of viewers assuming the interference of supernatural forces. The plot worked in the end, and the final twist neatly closed it. So why rummage through it four years later – what’s left to add here?

What is that for? For what? Who needs it?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say. The scenario of the second part is written completely without any idea or panache, and also – worst of all – it does not extend the previous story, but is attached to it by force. And not with super glue, but with canned pate. The only real strength of the previous The Boy was its ending (revealing that the doll was operated all the time by a deformed, sadistic boy living in the walls of a historic house). Disappointingly, the sequel neither makes any further use of this formula, nor does it try to play with the recipient’s expectations in a different way – here we jump straight to the worst cliche.

The film seems to deviate from the assumptions of the prototype for no reason, so I expected that the director, or at least the screenwriter, was changed. But no, William Brent Bell and Stacey Menear are responsible for both productions. Not much consolation, since they apparently used all the original ideas in the first part. The end result is simply bad – if you’ve seen any horror movies produced after 2000, you may not watch them, because you can predict the development of almost every scene after its first seconds.

Typical absurdities of contemporary horror movies? We have enough of this!

If Brahms: The Boy II was a hurdle runner, one who doesn’t even try to jump, but carelessly rams one obstacle after another. The only thing that can surprise us during the screening is how much the plot can be stripped of all surprises. The story is painfully single-threaded, all side characters or “random” events are entirely pretext-oriented and always appear in the film for one specific purpose.

There is so much cliche and script nonsense here that I don’t know where to start. If the hero enters the room and the camera jumps to a strange frame that is no longer focused on the character being tracked, you can be sure that something “scary” will appear at its center. The scarecrow should also be expected when, after a series of normal shots, the lens gets stuck on the protagonist’s face in a suspiciously long zoom.

Due to this approach, even jump scares do not work in The Boy II , because each of them is clearly announced either by increasing music or unusual camera behavior. I have no idea what the creators were thinking – almost every “scary” moment ruins itself with a spoiler. For example: during the opening of a certain scene, we get a close-up on a sharpened stick sticking out of the ground, and then the film tells us to wait a few minutes for one of the characters to finally fall on him. This guarantees a voltage comparable to waiting for the kettle in which water for tea is boiling to whistle …

The methods of pushing history forward are just as absurd – never for a moment will we be under the illusion that we are seeing “real life.” Everything happens here only because the plot demands it. That way, in the middle of the film, the characters suddenly start talking about the funny uncle and cousins ​​of the child protagonist, and two scenes later, these relatives come to visit… only to say two lines, feel the wrath of the malevolent doll and disappear. Another time, the head of the family completely accidentally runs into a “native” in the hospital, who just knows the history of his house and the nearby property several dozen years ago. Such treatments would be laughable even in the B-class production from the beginning of the century, but for some reason the creators use them several times without a bit of embarrassment.

The second plan comes to the rescue!

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the flaws of this work. The characters themselves also limp here, for example in the field of acting. The problems begin at the stage of creating the protagonist family, which is strikingly clichéd and uninteresting. How many horrors have there been about a “haunted” child, a neurotic mother and a good father who, almost until the very end, downplays disturbing events, ascribing them to his partner’s nervous disorder? Apparently not enough, because William Brent Bell serves us another one.

We follow most of the action through the eyes of Lisa (Katie Holmes), who is simply hard to like. She is always upset, overbearing, overly protective of her son, with whom, after Brahms’s appearance, she begins to enter into unnecessary quarrels and “trials of strength”. In addition, in the overwhelming majority of scenes, the performer of this role plays with one face, which does not change even when the protagonist looks at something shocking or macabre. I don’t know if this lack of expression is accidental or intentional (and was supposed to, for example, depict Lisa’s anesthesia after a traumatic experience), but in the end it comes out really bad.

In the case of the head of the family, Sean (Owain Yeoman), it’s no better because he gets relatively little screen time and is devoid of any character, all the while stuck in the film of a loving but busy and naive husband and father. This performance is cruelly bland, but it’s hard to even blame Yeoman, who basically had nothing to play here.

The young Christopher Convery, who shows the changes taking place in the boy after making contact with the dark doll, is doing quite well in the role of Jude. The brightest point of the cast turned out to be Ralph Ineson, the mysterious forester Joseph. Scenes with his participation are much nicer to watch than the others, and in the finale he even managed to show some acting “claw” and, at least for a moment, break above the disappointing average of this production.

You had to forgive it …

Brahms: The Boy II is a movie that just shouldn’t have been made because there was clearly no idea for it. The story is not engaging, the scenario is predictable – both on the micro and macro scale – the characters are one-dimensional and unoriginal, and the pace of the action lies and squeals (I haven’t had a session below 90 minutes for a long time). Only the final sequence turns out to be a bit more dynamic and more surprising, but even this effect ultimately ruins the jump into the next film and an unnecessary twist in the epilogue, which probably has – horror of horrors! – be an introduction to part three.

We invite you to the movie Brahms: The Boy 2 to the Cinema City network.