[as soon as he’s checked in the last guest for the night, contributing writer and appropriately creepy motel owner marrrrrrr likes to make a nice home-cooked meal just the way his mom used to and watch an atmospheric horror cuddled up on the couch with the preserved corpses of his dead parents. this is Midnight Movies.]
film: The Boy (2015)
food: salmon/jalapeño ramen.
pre-game: independent horror about a young sociopath in the making. (not to be confused w/ The Boy (2016) about the doll). all i remember about it is rainn wilson stars and it got polarizing reactions from audiences because of it’s slow pace. so been wanting to check it out since.
post-game: as compelling a subject as a “villainous” child can make for a horror film (likely because of the subversion of cultural association of childhood with innocence and purity), adolescent psychopathy can be an equally tricky subject for said films to tackle. frequently, the “explanations” for a child’s creepy and/or homicidal tendencies are supernatural (see, for example: The Omen (1976, 2006), Children of the Corn (1984)). if the movie tries to provide a psychological justification, it can read as either under-baked or heavy-handed, or, occasionally, sometimes both (Halloween (2007)). it’s no wonder that some movies sidestep the question altogether (Joshua (2007)).
The Boy, first time feature from relative newcomer Craig William Macneill, deserves a lot of credit, then, for providing a grounded, reasonable explanation for the title character’s anti-social tendencies that’s also, in the words of my high school english teacher, the appropriate length for both skirts and essays: “long enough to cover everything important, short enough to keep things interesting.”
the explanation is this: Ted (Jared Breeze) lives at an increasingly desolate remote motel run by his physically-present-but-otherwise-absent father, John (David Morse). Ted has almost no chances for socialization. customers are few and far between and his mother has left for florida years back. how is a child supposed to learn healthy human connections when there’s practically no humans to connect to?
Ted dreams of hopping a greyhound bus to go live with his mom. he saves as much money as he can, primarily the couple quarters he gets “paid” by his dad for cleaning up dead squirrels around the property. in one of the first scenes to hint at his budding psychopathy, Ted sneaks a bag of chips from the vending machine, eats half of it, then spreads the rest in the middle of the road in front of the motel. to put it in equally psychopathic terms: he’s creating demand.
i tend to take it with a grain of salt when audiences complain about slow pacing. a lot of movie watchers, maybe even most, prefer films that immediately try to grab the attention over something that might require patient, mindful viewing. it’s no sin, but it can lead to audiences undervaluing horrors that rely on atmospheric tension as opposed to ones that feature things like jump-scares or body counts.
that being said, the complaints about the pacing of The Boy, as prefaced in the pre-game, are fairly warranted. this movie is slow. it’s slower than a snail moving uphill. it’s slower than Bizarro-Sonic. if it was a party-anthem rapper from florida it would be Slow Rida. if it was a state responding to a global pandemic, it would also be florida. (seriously Ted, i know you want to ditch the dead-end motel life, but you can do better).
clocking in at about 1 hour and 50 minutes, The Boy is at least 20 minutes too long. Macneill, with plenty of sustained zoom-ins and wide shots of the desert landscape, is determined to set a bleak, isolated tone. it works, but to a noticeable excess. which is a shame because it strains some of the best parts of the movie. the music, by german composer Hauschka, is magnificently creepy, but approaches tedium as the movie goes on, and the tension that’s patiently built as Ted’s behavior slowly ramps to become more and more threatening to anything around him is dissipated by repetition. (for example: what would be a suspenseful moment — when Ted sneaks into a room to stand over a sleeping guest (Rainn Wilson)) — is undercut by mimicking a nearly identical scene from earlier.)
The Boy is based on a short film by Macneill and co-writer Clay McLeod Chapman. perhaps, during adaptation, they decided to produce as much material as they could in order to justify the feature length.
most of it is great. and it crescendos to an eerie, fiery climax.
i just wish they’d taken a few inches off the hem.
rating: you decide to get dressed up and go out for Halloween. you wind up at a bar you’ve never heard of. it’s not too big, but there’s plenty of people. the atmosphere is great: relaxed and just a little spooky. you’re having a great time. you catch eyes with an attractive stranger who compliments your costume. the place is almost legendary, except the service is slow and your whiskey is a little watered-down.
