Mark Reviews Movies: BRAHMS: THE BOY II

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2020

If The Boy was a big tease for a fairly obvious twist in the form of a generic horror movie, Brahms: The Boy II is a big tease for a twist that isn't really one. It's also a generic horror movie. Hey, when it's that broken, don't bother to fix it.

The first movie led up to the revelation that Brahms, a doll seemingly possessed by the soul of an allegedly murderous boy of the same name, was just a ruse. The real Brahms had survived a seemingly deadly fire and was living inside the walls of a once-grand manor. We also learned that we could remove the "allegedly" from the "allegedly murderous" description. Our protagonist, a victim of abuse who ran around for an unnecessarily long time in a towel, defeated Brahms and escaped. Brahms apparently survived yet again, though, and repaired the doll, which was broken by the protagonist's abuser.

A basic recap of the previous movie is probably necessary, since this sequel chronologically and technically follows the events of its predecessor. Brahms, the doll, returns, again seemingly possessed by some sinister soul, but in theory, we already know where this is going.

Screenwriter Stacey Menear, returning from the previous movie, makes the strange decision to treat this material as if the original movie doesn't exist. There are details to remind us, of course. A character does some internet sleuthing on the house and reads that, yes, there was a man living inside its walls. We're reunited with Brahms, the doll, pretty early. That just leaves us to wait for Brahms, the murderous man, to return.

After a while, though, the real Brahms fails to show up. We start to wonder if Menear and returning director William Brent Bell somehow forgot what happened in their previous movie. Maybe they're hoping to pull of the same trick twice, under the belief that perhaps they had made a movie so forgettable that the audience for this sequel will have forgotten the big twist.

A while later, with no Brahms in sight, we start to wonder if maybe we misremembered the revelations of the previous movie. There's "Brahms," so it should follow, obviously, that Brahms is also bound to show up sooner or later—well, definitely later by the point we start to ask these questions.

There's a reason the real Brahms of the previous movie is absent for most or—offering a second option, so as not to give away too much information—all of this sequel. The filmmakers have another twist in mind, and instead of transforming this pair of stories into something completely different, it just turns them into something that's differently generic.

As for the heroes this time, they're a family of three. Liza (Katie Holmes) is the victim of a violent robbery in the family's London apartment, and her young son Jude (Christopher Convery) witnesses the whole thing, leaving him in a traumatized state of silence in the ensuing five months. Sean (Owain Yeoman), the husband and father, decides that the family could use some time away from the city, so he books them a stay in the guest house of the manor where the man who lived in the walls was/is.

The kid finds the doll buried in the nearby woods. Liza starts to suspect that something is weird about the doll. Sean writes it all off as the aftereffects of his wife's own trauma, and Joe (Ralph Ineson), the mostly friendly groundskeeper who never lets go of his shotgun, appears to know a lot more than he's saying.

Like the previous movie, this one is just a lot of waiting for the truth to be revealed. In the meantime, Bell provides repeated scares of the jump variety (starting them right at the beginning, with Jude scaring his mom), as Brahms, the doll, seems to turn its head or move its eyes (In retrospect, considering the perspective Bell uses for these shots, he gives away the final twist without a second thought, but we're thinking that's too obvious and dunderheaded to be the truth). A table is flipped out of sight, with only Jude and the doll in the room, and inevitably, Liza finds herself behind the walls of the manor, where Bell provides the musical sting for a jump-scare that doesn't actually happen.

It's a lot of nothing—a series of fake-outs supporting a story that, as it turns out, could have been and is resolved with a two-minute web search. As for the final reveal of Brahms: The Boy II, it's not nothing—just a bunch of hooey.

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