The Boy (2016)

The Boy arrives in the grand tradition of films about inanimate objects that refuse to stay inanimate, and it conducts itself with grim efficiency. A young American, Greta, takes a post in a remote English village caring for a life-sized porcelain doll that the elderly Heelshires treat as their living son. There are rules. There is a mansion with a walled-off past. There is a fire, a drowned couple, and eventually a man in a doll mask lurking in the crawlspaces. The film declines, at every turn, to attach any larger social argument to its scares. The cast is uniformly white. Nobody remarks upon this, and the film does not ask them to. Race is not a subject the movie has any interest in raising.

The sole flicker of contemporary sensibility comes from Greta herself, a woman on the run from an abusive ex-boyfriend who has tracked her across an ocean. That detail supplies her with motive and momentum, and the actress plays the exhaustion of it well. But the film files it under backstory, a reason for her to stay in a house she should flee, and never pauses to make a statement about it. The wealthy Heelshires exist as gothic furniture, not as a target for class resentment. The real Brahms, described as odd and behaving like a child, is a monster behind a wall, not a case study. There is no lecture here, no lesson appended to the closing credits, nothing to take home but a mild case of the creeps.

Which leaves a lean genre exercise that knows its business and does it without commentary. The jump scares are dutiful. The twist lands with a thud that is not unpleasant. By the standards of the current cultural moment, the film is a relic, and the sequel that followed kept the faith. We classify it as a straightforward horror vehicle, one that asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to be startled in a dark room. There are worse things to be. There are also, for the purposes of our ledger, far more interesting ones.