This winter, audiences have been gifted with yet another adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s 19th-century novel Jane Eyre. From director William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside) comes the new spooky horror thriller The Boy, which… is not actually an adaptation of Jane Eyre at all. Except the film so closely mirrors the narrative and plot twists of the novel that Brontë would surely be petitioning for a writing credit were she alive today.
Greta Evans (Lauren Cohan), an American looking to recover from tragedy at home, travels to the English countryside to take a job as a nanny for the son of the wealthy Heelshires (Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle) — only to discover that young Brahms is actually a life-size porcelain doll that the Heelshires treat as if it were a real boy. Originally thinking her employers nuts, Greta ignores the strict list of rules she’s been given instructing her on how to care for Brahms; then, strange things start happening — various items of her clothing and possessions disappear, she hears eerie sounds throughout the house, Brahms physically changes position when she’s not in the room — and Greta begins to wonder if the doll is indeed alive.
Cohan is a solid lead, doing strong work that is very different from what she does as Maggie on The Walking Dead. She works hard to turn Greta into as much of a three-dimensional human as Stacey Menear’s script allows — tracking her development from broken-spirited sadness to confused fear to loving devotion as she spends more time with Brahms and struggles to figure it/him out. As Malcolm, the manor’s weekly delivery man who becomes Greta’s only ally, Rupert Evans (Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle) is charming and sweet, if forgettable.
The filmmakers are clearly pursuing Victorian-style Gothic chills here, but they also don’t trust the genre enough to engage the audience — the film relies too heavily on meaningless it-was-only-a-dream jump scares to titillate its viewers rather than allowing that Gothic sense of menace and dread to fully set in. Production designer John Willett is responsible for much of the mood in the film, and his memorable work is a true asset, especially the exceptionally creepy sets he’s built for when the film goes full Victorian Gothic in the last act.
Despite their many similarities, I’m reluctant to dismiss The Boy as merely derivative of Jane Eyre. The film is actually pretty sly about revealing exactly to what extent it’s evoking Brontë’s novel until the very moment that the connection becomes unavoidable. For a while, the film is genuinely unpredictable — it succeeds at taking the creepy if implausible premise and eventually luring the audience into believing that Brahms just might actually be alive, before taking matters to a place far more disturbing than one could have expected. The parallels to Jane Eyre are undeniable, but they’re more of a winking homage to the novel than they are the result of narrative laziness. If only the filmmakers could have trusted that the novel’s Gothic horror conventions were enough and stayed away from self-indulgent clichéd scares. Jane Eyre is, after all, an all-time classic of English literature for a reason.
