Mark Reviews Movies: THE LONELIEST BOY IN THE WORLD

The Loneliest Boy in the World, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 13, 2022

Questions about the story of The Loneliest Boy in the World end, perhaps, with whether everything that happens here is fantasy or reality and, either way, how no one seems to notice the smell of several corpses cooped up in a house for multiple days. They begin, though, with a fundamental inquiry: Who thought this idea, about a young man digging up several corpses so they can be his new "friends" and "family," was funny in the first place?

This allegedly is a comedy, although there's little humor to be found in either the setup or the execution of Piers Ashworth's screenplay. The story revolves around Oliver (Max Harwood), who has just turned 18 and been released from a psychiatric facility following the death of his domineering mother (played by Carol Anne Watts), who wouldn't let him leave the house. He calls it an "accident," and technically, her convoluted death—involving a swimming pool, a television set, and an unfortunately placed garden gnome—was accidental, as we see in a flashback.

Oliver is in denial and awaiting mom's return, even though he also visits her grave and recaps all the TV shows she's missing. Ashworth wants to use both of these jokes, so any kind of consistency doesn't matter. That's just the start of the uncertainty about what's actually happening here.

Meanwhile, a social worker (played by Ashley Benson) and psychiatrist (played by Evan Ross), who have been ordered by a court to advise on whether or not Oliver should return to the facility, tell the young man that, in order to stay out of the system, he has a week to make new friends. While visiting his mother's grave, he overhears a eulogy for Mitch (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), an English college student who had been studying aboard in the United States (An English coastal town unconvincingly stands in for somewhere—anywhere, for that matter—in the U.S., by the way).

Oliver tells his observers that Mitch is his new friend, but meeting him would be difficult. Using very specific and incredibly unnatural phrasing, the social worker insists that Oliver should "dig him up and drag him back to the house." Oliver takes that literally, and soon enough, he has robbed the graves of three victims of a recent plane crash (one that, coincidentally, also led to Mitch's death), pretending that the Susanne (Susan Wokoma) is his new mother, Frank (Ben Miller) is his father, and Mel (Zenobia Williams) is his kid sister. Oh, he also runs over the cemetery's little guard dog while stealing the corpses, so the pup's pulverized carcass is now his new pet, too.

The movie, directed by Martin Owen, begins as a comedy about how weird its protagonist is, finding little sympathy for him and refusing to be sincere about any of his many issues, and transforms into, well, something else. Those corpses either come to life or, in Oliver's mind, seem to be alive.

Susanne becomes a caring mother, while Frank is like the father he barely had, Mel annoys him, and Mitch gives him advice on going out on a date with Chloe (Tallulah Haddon). The living corpses or imagined family members have limbs fall off, patches of skin peel from their bodies, and various fluids pouring out of various orifices, such as when Frank projectile vomits some pizza he somehow eats.

At times, it's possible these undead friends are figments of Oliver's imagination, but for the most part, the filmmakers insist that they're real—interacting with the psychiatrist when he searches the house (No, he doesn't notice what must be a horrifying odor), meeting with Chloe's parents at a Halloween party, and even helping Oliver in his struggle against some cruel bullies. Most of these encounters, like most of the gags, involve dismemberment, which means even the movie's questionable potential as some kind of gross-out comedy is undone by way of a lack of imagination and repetition.

Not that The Loneliest Boy in the World is particularly shocking in the first place. To be sure, the whole concept here is distasteful, because it has no degree of respect for death in general and its living or resurrected characters specifically. The whole affair, though, is simply too confounding—in terms of its logic, its beliefs about what's funny, and its very purpose—to really offend. It's just a terrible and terribly misguided comedy.

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