Greta (The Walking Dead's charismatic Cohan), a young American arrives in Blighty to take up a position as a nanny. This is not the Britain of football and Brexits: this is the Britain of Harry Potter and baronial mansions: so yes, the film was shot in a Canadian castle.
Greta can barely supress a laugh when her posh new employers, the Heelshires (Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle) introduce her new charge, a porcelain doll called Brahms.
The Heelshires repeatedly insist that all is not what it seems and that Greta would be wise to follow Brahms’ extensive rules. Unhappily, as soon as the elderly couple have left, she breaches protocol by calling her sister and arranging a date with Malcolm, the grocery delivery ‘boy’ (Rupert Evans).
Soon enough, Greta realises that Brahms is capable of moving about on his own. Soon enough, she learns that the rules are mandatory. And soon enough, there's a lengthy trailer that reveals everything up until the point in the last act when The Boy gets too damned silly for its own good.
In a month when a new classier class of psychological horror - Goodnight Mommy, The Witch - has polarised traditional genre audiences, The Boy may momentary - with reference to Black Philip - reunite the sheep and the goats. Pleasingly ridiculous and high-concept in a way that Basketcase creator Frank Henenlotter would surely applaud, William Brent Bell's film is nicely orchestrated and powered along by actors - like Norton and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Evans - who are rather better than the material.
More scares - jump or otherwise - might have improved the final cut. But for confirmed automatonophobics, this is old-school fun.
