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The Boy - erm...

When I first saw the trailer for The Boy, I thought it was a joke. It looked like a sketch by Mitchell and Webb or Harry Hill. The doll looks far too over the top, like it's trying much too hard to be creepy.

The film kicks off with Greta (Lauren Cohan) taking a job as a nanny in a big, scary house with a couple that are clearly too old to need a nanny. And so we meet Brahms, the doll that has replaced their dead child. And right there, I got why so many critics hated it. The tentatively dark atmosphere, the overly frightened parents hiding a terrible secret and a scary oil painting stuck on a wall of endless wood panelling and a possessed toy - all the ingredients of a classic, old-school horror to such a silly degree that the movie is smothered in cliché. Hence the reason it comes across as a parody, a joke.

But those things are only clichés because we watched so many movies using the same tools - because we liked them. We might look back on them now with a shake of the head, roll of the eyes and a shared smile, but there's a certain amount of endearing, slightly embarrassed nostalgia - a bit like remembering hideous fashions, or music you took so seriously.

Getting past all of that, the movie drew me in. In fact, it got to a point where I thought it had a new take, that it was playing on the psychological aspect of Greta, like the old couple, having to deal with the loss a child, and the boy really was just a doll; the ghosts were in her own head and this was really going somewhere...

...and then it all went tits up and resorted to type. It went from seventies' creepy to eighties' Wes Craven land. And I still enjoyed it (a bit), because I loved those movies too, but for a while there, I honestly thought it was going to take the old school style and show us something new.

Shame really. Could have been brilliant.

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