Film review: Brightburn **
A little imagination is a dangerous thing in Brightburn, a sci-fi/horror oddity that comes with ideas but only ends up causing problems for itself. But first… can we talk about the children? This is the third film in three months (after The Prodigy and The Hole in the Ground) where a seemingly sweet little boy gets possessed and starts attacking people, and you have to wonder what profound social anxiety is being reflected here. Is it a fear of rebellious youth, as it was in the 70s (when we got The Omen and The Exorcist)? Is it a kind of coded guilt that we’ve screwed up the planet so badly for future generations? Are we just sick and tired of the little monsters, with their inflated sense of self-esteem and being ‘special’?
12-year-old Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) is indeed “very special” – but he’s not just a snowflake, he’s quite an unusual lad. Brandon has powers, for better and worse. Faced with a malfunctioning lawnmower, he throws it clean across the yard in a fit of pique – then calmly reaches in to silence the whirring blades with his bare hands. The hens in the henhouse freak out when he stares at them unblinkingly (our red-state setting is Brightburn, a small Kansas farming community), then are later found slaughtered, the metal door torn off its hinges. The boy sits at the dinner table chewing on his fork absent-mindedly, as boys do – but the fork, when he takes it out, is mangled, its prongs warped and twisted, much to the shock of mum Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and dad Kyle (David Denman).
Actually, no: Mum and Dad aren’t entirely shocked – which is where Brightburn is different from the other recent evil-child movies, and also where it needed a few dozen rewrites in order to work. Hard to know what counts as a spoiler here, but it’s clear from the prologue that something’s up: Tori and Kyle, still childless and indeed infertile, pray for a sprog – then one night there’s a kind of earthquake, a suggestion of a deep unearthly rumble, then cut to baby Brandon being cooed-over by his ‘adoptive’ parents. The film’s publicity leans hard on the bad-superhero angle (‘What if Superman used his powers for evil?’), recalling early-00s films like Super and Chronicle where mild-mannered Clark Kents succumbed to their darker impulses.
Brandon does indeed don a cape and mask in the second half, his eyes glowing red. You get that much from the trailer, which makes it look like an all-out horror movie – but in fact the kid is more of a tragic figure (and a kid, after all), lashing out at the world like Carrie in Carrie. There’s a psychological aspect in Brightburn which the film mostly ignores, going instead for gross effects like a shard of glass being pulled from an eyeball (other joys include disembowelment and a grotesquely shattered jaw). The script is by Brian and Mark Gunn, respectively a brother and cousin of the film’s producer James Gunn – and James, of course, is a big-shot, the power behind Guardians of the Galaxy (as well as the aforementioned Super), making you wonder if nepotism got in the way of excellence here.
Seriously, this film makes no sense. Gregory Peck in The Omen protected his son because he didn’t want to believe the worst – but these parents know the worst, they have solid proof right there in their barn. Brandon, we’re told, has never bled in his life; it’s not like Mum and Dad can plead ignorance, so what exactly was the plan here? Banks’ role is especially tricky, indeed Brightburn could only have worked if Tori were depicted as a kind of psycho, driven mad by trying not to lose the child she wanted so badly. Banks should be playing with the nutty abandon of Piper Laurie in Carrie, not just mildly in denial and telling herself that Brandon was “sleepwalking” after she finds him crouched in the barn, frantically tugging at the trapdoor that covers the [spoiler]. Brandon himself is potentially a rich character, like the omnipotent kid in the classic sci-fi story ‘It’s a Good Life’ (a nice little boy, but get on his bad side and he’ll think you into something horrific buried deep in the cornfield) – but the film is so busy being an origin story, it never quite evokes the chilling horror of a family acting artificially sweet in a bid to deny the unimaginable.
Brightburn gets increasingly daft, yet it has ideas. Parents trying to be parents to a monster, and the monster trying (here’s the poignant part) to be a good boy. Kyle trying to have “the talk” with pubescent Brandon, whose sexual urges – if any – seem to be a little weird. Then again, is that really so surprising? Why, apart from the demands of a script trying to build non-existent suspense, should these parents behave like their ‘son’ is an ordinary kid? Brightburn is a half-baked film that required either way more style or way more psychology (and way less reliance on graphic violence). Still, it has ideas.
DIRECTED BY David Yarovesky
STARRING Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn
SCI FI HORROR
US 2019 91 mins
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