Brahms: The Boy II movie review (2020)
The first film was basically a modestly clever cheat, convincing viewers that it was a movie about a possessed doll and then twisting that narrative in the final scenes. The story of a woman who was tasked to take care of a doll as if it was a real boy, and became convinced that it was real only to find that there was a man living in the wall, had at least a bit of simple narrative thrust compared to the nonsensical places that “Brahms: The Boy II” ends up. It’s almost as if someone started the project by asking “How can we get crazier than the ending of the first movie?” And then worked back from there.
Sadly, even posing that question probably makes “Brahms” sound significantly more fun than it actually is. The truth is that it breaks a cardinal rule of genre filmmaking which is that if your film isn’t going to make much sense, it at least needs to be fun. A movie this boring that doesn’t cohere at all narratively is just dreadful. And the worst thing is that there’s a point in the final act when it feels like “Brahms” could have become the crazy movie it needed to at least be memorable, but then it just fizzles to one of those annoying non-endings that makes even less sense than the nonsense that preceded it.
Anyway, back to the story. After a home invasion that’s filmed just horrendously, a mother (Katie Holmes), her husband (Owain Yeoman), and their son Jude (Christopher Convery) move to a country estate that will be familiar to fans of the original. Actually, they move to a guest house on the grounds of that estate, which is only one of many bad decisions here because while the setting was actually an effective element of the first movie, you'll have no such luck here. On the first day there, Jude finds the doll known as Brahms buried in the woods—always a good sign when your kid finds a creepy doll buried with its clothes in a coffin in the creepy woods. But mom plays along. And because of the trauma of the attack on his mother that he witnessed, Jude has gone mute, and Brahms seems to open him up. And possibly make him crazy!
