★
After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms.
Classification: 15
Sometimes there's nothing to say.
Sometimes the hardest thing about writing reviews is that after watching a certain film, the only rational thought your annihilated brain can muster out is an unenthusiastic "it sucked". A blanket statement of passionless awfulness you hope no one would ever ask you to elaborate on what seems to have killed your love of cinema. Brahms: The Boy II is such a film, a chasm of insufferable boredom that has no artistic reason to exist beyond some moronic notion that rich could be arranged. No one is getting rich from this, not financially, spiritually and definitely not cinematically as its an exhausting 90 minutes of the stalest, unengaging horror I've seen in a long time. 2020 has already delivered some abysmal entries into the genre (we're only two months in!) but somehow director William Brent Bell and screenwriter Stacey Menear show that the depths of rock bottom are ever limitless.
I have not seen the original 2016 film and you don't need to as Brahms: The Boy II cherry-picks what it needs for its hilariously overt expository dumps explaining the cursed history of the Heelshire Mansion and the Brahms doll. Although it seems Bell and Menear have decided to go full supernatural demon doll now abandoning the killer in the wall trope from the first film. So yeah now it's Child's Play with none of the charisma and a miserable bland gothic aesthetic for Katie Holmes to look mildly disturbed in. Recovering from a brutal home invasion that left Holmes' Liza injured and son Jude traumatised, the family decides to relocate to the countryside where they stay in the guest house of the Heelshire Mansion. Jude, now voluntarily mute as a result of the attack discovers Brahms buried on the property and forms an unhealthy attachment to the doll creating tension between him and his parents as the most tiresome occult coincidences have Holmes' character question the sanity of herself and her child.
The property is now under watch by Joe the groundskeeper portrayed by Ralph Ineson's deep Yorkshire accent (the red herring of the piece, although even this film screws this up). Ineson's first scene shows him in classic gamekeeper uniform carrying a 12 gauge shotgun and walking with a German Shepard named Oz. If the whole movie had just been Ineson and this dog walking through the British countryside narrating on whatever topic popped into his mind it would have been more riveting, inescapable cinema compared to the putrid banality on offer from this porcelain nightmare. It's so boring you can't truly be mad at it for wasting your time, it's like a leech, something that just drains your resolve and leaves you defeated. The obvious setups and jump scares can't inspire more than a pitiful laugh at William Brent Bell's attempts to make the tired idea of a creepy possessed doll frighteningly original. "Oh the doll moved its eyes, it's alive!" who gives a shit? Brahms: The Boy II is the horror equivalent to a lobotomy as this concept should be rife for terrible movie magic and schlocky goodness but by God, there is nothing to grasp on to.
It's not the worse film ever made, but Brahms: The Boy II is a film that can inspire nothing from itself or in its audience. It is dull, insipid laziness that builds to the most dismal anticlimax with no suspense for its characters or resolutions to their pain. Terrible performances all around and while I don't specifically want to blame the child actors skills as I'm sure not much thought was put into their direction, they were insufferable for their whole screentime. A film with no depth or suspense and wastes every iota of horror potential, I mean I have a phobia of ventriloquist puppets! I'm the perfect target audience to be terrified by a creepy doll film and I felt nothing as each uninspired cliché unveiled itself.
It sucked and sometimes that's all you need to say.
Director: #WilliamBrentBell
Screenwriter: #StaceyMenear
Release Date: February 21st 2020
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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