by Peter Callaghan

Ceramic boy by fraught nanny is nursed
But the real question is: who will crack first?

Dinah Washington – one of my favourite singers of all time and surely one of the sassiest (don’t call me Shirley) – had a big hit in the 1950s with Noel Coward’s torch song Mad About The Boy which is a fitting description of my reaction to director William Brent Bell’s latest horror. My response though, unlike the Queen of the Blues’, is not fuelled by ardour (though a young man who is thick as two short planks and stiff as a board does hold a certain allure) but frustration because what could have been a taut nerve-jangler is relegated to a formulaic frightener which prizes style over substance. Which is not to say The Boy doesn’t have its moments, because it does; it’s just that they are few and far between and when they do come they lack the necessary intensity and danger of, say, 10 Cloverfield Lane which is easily one of the best films of the year so far.

Lauren Cohan (Maggie Greene from the American television series The Walking Dead) plays emotionally distraught Greta who has swapped the snowy peaks of Montana for the leafy countryside of England to get away from her abusive boyfriend Cole (Ben Robson). As luck would have it – bad luck as it turns out – Mr and Mrs Heelshire (Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle) are looking for a nanny to take care of their eight-year-old son Brahms while they go on a lengthy vacation. Greta would get the run of the house, enough wine and cheese to satisfy Bridget Jones and plenty of time and space to figure out what she wants to do with the remainder of her threescore years and ten. Oh, and she’ll also receive a not-to-be-sniffed-at stipend of the equivalent of a month’s wages for each week she attends to the child’s needs.

What’s the catch, I hear you cry? Porcelain. For contrary to the old nursery rhyme which says “Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails, that’s what little boys are made of”, Brahms’ constitution is more ceramic than calorific. The real boy, we are told, died in a house fire almost twenty years ago to the day and as a means of dealing with their grief Mr and Mrs Heelshire chose to treat the doll as if it was their son. A light breakfast at seven, followed by three hours of reading five times a week and a healthy appreciation of classical music forming the bulk of his daily schedule. A set of instructions are left, including “No guests”, “Don’t forget to feed” and “Kiss goodnight”. But an ominous farewell suggests that things may go bump in the night. “Be good to him and he’ll be good to you,” Greta is told. “But be bad to him…” The repercussions of which remain untold because the couple beat a hasty retreat.

What starts out as a creepy mystery about clothes going missing, an unseen figure running up and down the corridor late at night and a spate of silent phone calls at critical or inconvenient moments, neatly slides into a psychological study of emotional meltdown as Greta begins to believe that what she is seeing and hearing has less to do with the cold, dead eyes of Brahms and more to do with the cold, dead heart within triggered by the breakdown of her long-term relationship with Cole whose abusive actions, we learn, led to the death of their unborn child and a subsequent restraining order being imposed upon him. To distract her from her pain, she turns to the clairvoyant “grocery boy” and king of the cod one-liners Malcolm (Rupert Evans) who attempts to lighten the mood and woo her with wit by reading her fate in a half-chewed piece of gum. Tea leaves and palms are so last year!

But then everything stalls. The direction, editing, orchestration and cinematography are meticulous – perhaps too meticulous, because we become increasingly aware of their presence and how they are used to manipulate mood and set up a scare – and the actors though fine are not really given much to sink their teeth into because the screenplay by Stacey Menear lacks drama, elicits giggles and like the direction is more concerned with style than substance. And as for the big finale, it’s a cracking twist but the execution is far too tepid. For once, I wanted blood and gore, chainsaws and cleavers; but all I got was a Tom and Jerry chase round the house with a chisel. That said, I don’t want to throw the porcelain baby out with the bathwater, because there was enough in the film for me and the cinemaful of spotty teenagers to hold our attention. Though unlike Dinah Washington: on the silver screen, it didn’t melt my foolish heart in every single scene.

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Peter Callaghan
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