Main cast: Jared Breeze (Ted Henley), David Morse (John Henley), Rainn Wilson (William Colby), and Bill Sage (The Sheriff)
Director: Craig Macneill
The Boy and The Boy are both horror films, but their similar titles aside, there are nothing else that these two have in common. While this one is considered a horror film, I’d argue that it’s more of a dark drama about how serial killers are shaped by the environment they are born into.
Ted Henley is nine. His parents ran a failing motel in what seems like the middle of nowhere… that is, until his mother ran off with one of the guests, leaving both father and son without a backward glance. Ted’s father John isn’t cruel, but he has a habit of drinking himself into a stupor, so the poor boy grows up neglected and left to his own devices. He has only chickens and a pet bunny for company, and collects roadkill for his order for pocket money—which his father will later steal to buy his alcohol. Occasionally, the boy will encounter lovely families that check into the motel, and dream of leaving the place with them when they check out. That never happens, of course, but that doesn’t stop him from entering their room to watch them while they sleep.
Yes, poor Ted is developing habits that will give child psychologists cause for concern. He has no sense of boundaries, often stalking people and sometimes touching them without their permission. He also develops a morbid fascination of death—instead of collecting roadkill, he begins to experiment with luring animals to their death instead. The arrival of William Colby, a guest with his own secrets, will hasten the acceleration of Ted’s increasingly disturbing and violent behavior.
On paper, this one has all the working of a great, disturbing film. In many ways, it’s pretty good. Jared Breeze puts on a pretty compelling and often heartbreaking performance as a lost boy that has never had any chance in the first place, given his father’s criminal emotional neglect of him. Deprived of affection and even attention, the poor kid’s isolation and loneliness causes all that anger to slowly build inside him, and he never learns how to uncork those feelings in a healthy way.
Unfortunately, this movie is so afraid that I may deviate from its agenda—to view Ted with a mixture of pity and disquiet—that it cranks up the melodramatic meanness of the people around Ted. Aside from a family that showed up briefly as a plot device to show me how Ted yearns for a happy family to belong to, everyone mocks and beats up Ted, everyone is mean to him, everyone is just plain piece of crap. This movie wants me to cheer when Ted finally unleashes his own Carrie-style revenge on his tormentors. Sure, I do, but at the same time, I am very well aware of the clumsy attempts of this movie to force me to behave that way. If the people around Ted had been less e-e-e-evil, Ted’s damage would have been more poignant, more terrifying. As it is, the whole thing feels tad like a melodramatic cartoon.
The director-cum-co-screenwriter also believes that the more he drags out a scene, the more profound the movie will come off as. Hence, there are so, so many scenes of the camera just zooming in on a static object or a face for who knows why. It’s as if Mr Macneill believed that somehow profundity will magically flow from a scene if he had the camera fixated and held in position on someone’s face or an object for as long as possible. I can only stand so many of such scenes before I want to throw up my hands and ask why. Is there something I should locate in that particular scene, like Waldo hiding in the background?
Anyway, The Boy is actually a pretty okay watch, and it has the kernel of a gloriously disturbing movie buried under the layers of overwrought cartoon melodrama of bad, bad people. If only the people behind this movie had trusted me to get what it wants to do, really. That’s assuming, of course, that they know what they want to do in the first place.
