Brahms: The Boy II

Directed by William Brent Bell

Let’s start this review of Brahms: The Boy II with an anecdote from when I myself was a young lad. When I was a boy, you might call me The Boy, I could never quite get to sleep. I would keep my parents up all night, we’d all feel terrible the next day, it was a real shitshow. We tried a lot of things to fix it, but the one I remember most vividly was a tape player (oh god I’m so old) that played soothing ocean sounds so I would relax and fall asleep. If only I had a copy of Brahms: The Boy II back then, then I could have watched it every night and been bored into a deep slumber, solving all of our problems. If that’s not a sparkling endorsement, then I don’t know what is.

The Bountiful Joys Of Brahms: The Boy II

The premise of Brahs: The Boy II is that after a home invasion that leaves two family members, Mom (Katie Holmes) and son (a young actor), traumatized by the incident the family vacations in the countryside for a bit to relax. While out there, the boy finds a doll who is a magic version of the Brahms doll from the first film. Slowly Brahms starts possessing the boy or changing him into a living version of Brahms himself, it’s a bit unclear. Mom thinks son is being talked to or controlled or magicked at by Brahms and spoiler alert she is completely right from scene 1. I don’t want to endlessly rag on Brahms: The Boy II, but resisting that urge is going to be incredibly difficult as this is one of the most easily mockable films I’ve ever seen. It isn’t necessarily because of the premise but rather because there is no filmmaking here to speak of.

The Unintentional Comedy Is There But Not Enough

It will always be tricky to build atmosphere in a movie about an evil doll, but that’s why you need strong direction, writing, and cinematography. Without all those things working together you end up with scenes where Katie Holmes, who plays the mom, gasping in horror at a doll that we have no reason to be afraid of. And that isn’t scary, it’s goofy! So many scenes are unintentionally hilarious that this may be a great movie to riff with your friends. I can’t confirm that because unfortunately our theatre had people in it and we could not give running commentary like when we watched Spies In Disguise. But I can say there were many moments where a particularly absurd thing happened and one of us would turn to the others and share a meaningful look.

Is Something Going To Happen?

Those moments are too few and far between. Most of the runtime here is taken up by scenes of Katie Holmes looking at a doll, while the doll sits there doing nothing. An unmoving doll might be scary in some context, like, if we had some reason to be afraid of it, but we don’t. No scenes establish what Brahms might be doing or why he is doing it. And these don’t need to be heavy exposition sequences of someone explaining point-blank what Brahms is, these could just be sequences of Brahms doing things or being intimidating or have him be shot creepily. Just do something! Put something in the movie!

A Desperate Attempt At Some Kind of Plot That Flops Spectacularly

I’m not even sure if it is supposed to be ambiguous whether or not Brahms is a magic doll or if the mom is just suffering from PTSD and imagining it. I will give some credit to the first act of Brahms, where both Mom and Boy are working through traumas sustained from this home invasion, but these ideas never go anywhere and the concepts that the movie is desperately trying to about get clumsily tripped over as the narrative itself forgets that it is about things. There’s an attempt at ambiguity from when Mom keeps having night terrors and we are led to believe that she may be imagining that Brahms is evil, but then we see Brahms move his head and eyes unaided and that breaks any questions I had. In my mind, Brahms was confirmed to be evil and any attempt at building ambiguity or tension flopped.

Wait Why Is This Happening?

That isn’t helped by all the absolutely baffling plot elements that come up in this regard. At one point Mom finds creepy drawings in a pad that Boy has done, which are admittedly violent and creepy and I kind of liked, but when she goes to show them to Dad they are gone and he says, “Well what did he do, rip them out?”. Yes? That isn’t a stretch. And right before this Brahms and Boy are in a room and then a huge and massive wooden table is flipped offscreen. Mom rushes in and shouts at her rail-thin 12-year-old, “WHAT DID YOU DO?” Lady, this kid isn’t flipping this table, at least not in 5 seconds. We’ve moved past the possible and into the ‘this is obviously evil magic you need to leave now’s phase.

I KNOW NOTHING BRAHMS PLEASE RELEASE ME

And that wouldn’t be bad necessarily but I never knew what Brahms wanted. He wanted Boy to be with him but I don’t know why. He has rules but I don’t know why they’re important. He drives children to become killers but I don’t know how or why. There’s an attempt to build a mythology, I suppose, but it all contradicts everything we learned in The Boy and none of it is ever explained well enough to be a sensical reason for what is happening. I would be angrier if I actually cared about this movie, but luckily I don’t. I don’t care about any of these issues because I and the people I was with all had to fight off slumber the entire time. Staying awake during Brahms: The Boy II was a constant struggle.

Shit Was Wack

When we walked out of Brahms: The Boy II, we didn’t talk about the themes of the movie, or the performances, or even if it was scary. The first thing out of my mouth was, “so was that the worst movie we’ve seen this year?” and no one could strongly disagree. Maybe The Turning is worse, but that’s only because of the ghost rapist, and that is a looooooooow bar. Boring, pointless, painfully slow, and worst of all not scary at all. Brahms: The Boy II has no interest in being a movie. As we were walking out of the theater, the two people behind us, who were also the only two other people there, summed up this movie better than I could by saying one simple phrase: “Shit was wack”. There you have it, folks, Brahms: The Boy II is wack, and there is no reason to see it in a movie theater. If you really want to watch it for five minutes before turning it off, I’d suggest waiting for it to come to Netflix.