Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

Brahms: The Boy II arrives as the second entry in a franchise about a porcelain doll, which is a sentence that carries its own verdict. Katie Holmes plays Liza, a mother recovering from a home invasion, who moves with her husband and her mute son to a remote estate. The son finds a doll in the woods. The doll has opinions. The house has history. The groundskeeper has a grievance. We have seen this film before, and so has the film.

The diligent classifier finds the absence of agenda striking. The child's silence is trauma, plainly stated, never recast as a neurodiversity narrative. The mother protects her son because mothers in horror films do, not because the screenplay has anything to say about gender. A therapist appears, played by Anjali Jay, and is permitted to simply be a therapist. Race, class, climate, and the body all go unexamined, and the film does not appear to notice it has left them alone. There is no sermon, no lesson, no moment where the audience is asked to examine its own complicity in anything. The doll wants what it wants.

The craft is thin. Critics were unkind, the Rotten Tomatoes tally settled at eleven percent, and Katie Holmes earned a Razzie nomination for her trouble. The film opened fifth and vanished. It is, in the end, a rare specimen: popular entertainment with no cultural program whatsoever, asking nothing of us but a ticket and ninety minutes we will not recover. A clean zero. We do not often encounter such purity.