Written by: Craig William Macneill, Clay McLeod Chapman (novel)
Directed by: Craig William Macneill
Starring: David Morse, Jared Breeze, and Rainn Wilson
Reviewed by: Brett Gallman (@brettgallman)
Evil always begins somewhere.
The Boy is a fine illustration of the impact that music, tone, and mood can have on a film. If you were to watch about half of it and ignore the ominous sound cues and its portentous, lingering shots of desolate landscapes, it’d be easy to mistake it for a coming-of-age drama focused on a confused, lonely boy looking to connect with someone—even if it’s a quiet, middle-aged weirdo who wanders into his life. You could even read his fascination and flirtations with death as a natural, childlike curiosity. Plug your ears and squint, and you might even think The Boy has the capacity for sweetness as a bearded, haunted Rainn Wilson forges an unlikely bond with this poor kid who just wants to get the fuck out of dodge and reunite with his mom in Florida.
But holy shit, you should not do this and get the wrong idea about The Boy, which is actually one of the grimmest, most grounded takes on the creepy kid genre in recent memory. As its moody, unnerving synth score pulses in the background, it transforms into an experience that’s sinister in its inevitability. You’re watching a coming-of-age tale, but it’s essentially one for Norman Bates.
Set at a dusty, off-the-beaten-path motel that seems to actively invite comparisons to Psycho, the film hovers around Ted (Jared Breeze), a 9-year-old boy left mostly to his own devices while his weary father (David Morse) tends to what’s left of the family business. Visitors to the motel are few and far between, so much so that any random passersby are a welcome intrusion on Ted’s daily routine, which mostly consists of him scraping roadkill off the road for chump change. Before long, he’s even baiting the animals into the road to make the job easier. Not exactly the most riveting life, but also not one that points to a budding sociopath.
Even when visitors—such as the aforementioned middle-aged widower (Wilson) and a family of four—do arrive, there’s nothing that immediately disturbing about Ted’s behavior towards any of them. Like his father suggests, he may simply just have trouble adjusting to the presence of others, and his long, lonely days naturally have him seeking their extended company—even if it means stealthily dismantling their car engine, effectively forcing them to stay. Little by little, these incidents begin to add up, gradually escalating from impish nonsense to legitimately disturbing behavior. Ted’s preoccupation with animal mutilation evolves into a fascination with human flesh, eventually culminating in overt acts of violence.
Ted’s descent into violence doesn’t exactly occur in a straight line; rather, The Boy is a collection of moments, not unlike Linklater’s Boyhood. Some disturb, but others don’t. One minute, Ted’s playfully threatening to drown another kid in a pool, the next he’s attentively listening to Wilson explain that the box in his car contains the ashes of a dead loved one. It’s the unassuming nature of it all that’s so skin-crawling: director Craig Macneill isn’t interested in making a movie that thrives on big, obvious moments, nor is he even trying to unlock the mystery of what drives a relatively normal young boy to violence.
What he is invested in is crafting the suggestion of an explicable evil lying in wait, lurking below the surface of this otherwise quiet, rustic drama. The Boy is perhaps a half-step removed from the early works of David Gordon Green, but Macneill’s crucial modulations take it into a different, more unsettling space altogether. Composer Hauschka’s menacing score is an especially vital accent, one that guides the audience towards the realization that the sum total of these moments will not be pleasant. Some sequences feature an unnerving, clacking beat that faintly echoes Harry Manfredini’s signature “ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma,” an aural homage that foreshadows Ted’s arc. Explanations (and even pop psychology) may be in short supply in The Boy, but there’s no shortage of a suffocating sense of fatalism.
The only question is where exactly its final destination lies. Credit is due to Breeze, whose excellent poker face consistently keeps audiences guessing. This isn’t your typical creepy kid performance since Breeze doesn’t rely on obvious tics and showy mannerisms (especially when compared to, say, Daeg Faerch’s mugging in Halloween); rather, Ted almost feels like a normal kid, albeit one with some odd habits and a morbid obsession with death. His desire to ditch his dad and live with his mom perhaps even hints at some sort of reconciliation—or maybe even an escape from the awful instincts festering inside him. When pitched against the melancholy turns from Morse and Wilson, Breeze’s performance captures a lost soul at a crossroads: in these two adult figures, there’s the potential for guidance that never quite comes. You can sense Ted trying to subconsciously cling to them, but he only meets with ashes, dust, and soot.
Even though The Boy isn’t exactly out to trick you with a topsy-turvy climax or any sort of twist, you don’t quite grasp what it’s really getting at until its final sequence. It’s here you realize that Macneill has essentially been working towards building the sort of mythology that might be covered in either the prologue or the flashback of a slasher movie. Watching the pieces suddenly fall into place is oddly delightful: while much of the film vaguely echoes Psycho, it ends up in Psycho III territory—which is to say, it’s basically an 80s slasher replete with obnoxious, horndog kids piling into the motel for a prom after-party. Hell, the climax is even ushered in by the sly revelation that the film is actually set in 1989 as Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”* blares as an ironic herald to the eventual carnage.
There’s nothing glib or ionic about Ted crossing his final threshold here, at least not on the surface. His actual actions—while weirdly sympathetic—are horrific, but it’s interesting to see Macneill deftly straddle the line between making audiences cringe and chuckle, much like the films to which he eventually pays tribute. Some of Ted’s final lines exchanges (particularly a one-liner that could double as a corny slasher movie tagline) nudge the audience right into his headspace: you can’t help but laugh at the wryness here as both Ted and the film embrace the sociopathic mean streak that’s been rumbling throughout.
Since it takes its time in revealing its hand with a 110-minute runtime, The Boy definitely operates at its own deliberate speed. Technically adapted from exactly one chapter of Clay McCleod Chapman’s novel Miss Corpus, it’s low on sustained plot, yet rich in establishing a mythology that will apparently play out over two more films that will track Ted’s further development, meaning the slasher genre will have its own Antoine Doinel. In the wake of Stevan Mena’s ill-fated, aborted Malevolence trilogy, this is a welcome take on a genre that’s often forged icons without truly trying to comprehend them.
*The use of this particular song furthers the argument that The Boy isn’t too far removed from quirky indie dramedy territory thanks to its recent appearance in The Skeleton Twins.
The Boy is now available on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory; the disc includes a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that further details Macneill’s plans for this trilogy of films.
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