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BRIGHTBURN
Director: David Yarovesky Cast: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn, Matt Jones, Meredith Hagner, Emmie Hunter, Becky Wahlstrom, Gregory Alan Williams MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:31 Release Date: 5/24/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 24, 2019 It's shocking that nobody has come up with the premise of Brightburn before. Actually, it would be more of a shock if there weren't a Superman comic book or dozens that have wondered what it would be like if the alien superhero turned evil. Here, though, we get the usual origin story of that cosmic traveler, who crashed on Earth and was raised by a good-hearted, childless couple on a Kansas farm. It turns out that the child's discovery of his powers awakens another, more diabolical nature. This boy isn't Clark Kent. He has, in that old tradition of the comics, a different alliterative name: Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn). In this world, the story of Superman apparently doesn't and cannot exist—for narrative and, obviously, legal reasons. Otherwise, Brandon's adoptive parents might have an idea of what they're in for when they decide that the baby who crash-landed in an alien spacecraft needs people to care for him. They have no idea, but we do. Because we do, the movie, written by cousins Brian and Mark Gunn, exists in a strange vacuum, in which it's directly subverting the concept of Superman without considering any other alternative. This isn't a satire or deconstruction of the superhero story. It's simply a straightforward horror movie, in which the cliché of the twisted and eventually murderous bad seed just happens to possess superpowers. That this story could have been much more is undeniable. We only have the movie that's in front of us to discuss, though. Any speculation about or suggestion of what could have been is always and simply a distraction from the movie itself—the only thing that really matters when considering and analyzing a movie. As such, this movie possesses a neat gimmick for a horror tale, a clever sabotage of a beloved superhero, and an unfortunate belief that the combination of these basic conceits is enough to excuse the fact that it doesn't do anything of real value with either idea. Brandon's adoptive parents are Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman), who indeed live on a Kansas farm and, one night while trying to start a family in the traditional way, are startled by an earth-shaking crash outside. Twelve years later, the two have raised Brandon as best they can. He seems like a decent kid, until the spacecraft hidden in the barn calls to him in the night. After that, he's sulky and angry, with an idea of taking over the world in his head. While Kyle's best friend Noah (Matt Jones) and his school-counselor wife Merilee (Meredith Hagner) wave away the attitude change as puberty, Tori and Kyle worry that their son's otherworldly origin might be the cause. Brandon turns creepy and then violent on a dime. No sooner is he a good kid, eager to help around with chores, than he's yelling at his father, using his flying and speed powers to watch the girl he has a crush on while she's in bed, and breaking that girl's hand when she rightly calls him out on his actions. One could call this a twisted parable about the seemingly sudden changes of adolescence or an allegory about the ways in which boys can wrongly learn the ways of wooing (There's a scene in which Kyle gives his son "the talk," and the boy seems to misunderstand what his dad means when he says it's fine to act on his sexual feelings). Such a reading would demand more than what's presented here. All of this is simply the slow build-up to the inevitable, when Brandon's taste of power and an overtly stated sense of superiority turn him from moody stalker to vicious killer. Once Brandon becomes obviously and unmistakably evil, every other concern—from the warping of superhero-origin conventions, to the twisting of adolescent entitlement to an extreme, to the always-present question of nature vs. nurture—goes out the window. We just get a horror show, with director David Yarovesky providing plenty of jump scares and gruesome, bloody violence for the sake of shock. A woman's eyeball is pierced by a piece of broken glass, and the camera lingers on the results of a man's jaw being detached by a high-speed impact with a steering wheel. That these grotesque injuries are the results of Brandon's superpowers is, somehow, almost inconsequential, since the end goal is just carnage on an escalating scale. In a movie landscape that has become decorated with towering monuments of superhero tales and franchises, the premise of Brightburn certainly feels novel. That doesn't mean the movie should only aim to exist as a macabre novelty. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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