brahms the boy ii movie review

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There has been an unexpected mini-trend lately in which horror sequels, not typically a strong subgenre, have been surprisingly strong creatively with films like “ Ouija: Origin of Evil ” and “ Annabelle: Creation ,” both better than the movies that preceded them. Perhaps this is what led someone to believe that “Brahms: The Boy II” was a good idea. This person was wrong.

Maybe that’s harsh, but at least that person was wrong with this version of a sequel that even fans of the original probably weren’t really expecting. Given that "The Boy II" arguably works better—and makes a tick more sense even—if you haven’t seen the original, if you’re one of those people turn away now because the ending will have to be spoiled to discuss the new one. You’ve been warned.

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!

As Jude adopts a creepier posture and dead-eyed stares, mom starts to wonder if Brahms is possessed and ordering Jude around, and director William Brent Bell leans into the idea way more than the first movie that Brahms is animated. We see his eyes and head move in cartoonish, horribly rendered ways, although you keep telling yourself that it could be a product of mom’s trauma, which has been leading her to have a few hallucinations of her own. (And because you're trying to make the movie more interesting.) Things get more intense as Jude starts relaying how unhappy Brahms is with mom and dad. Finally, a creepy guy named Joseph ( Ralph Ineson ) wanders the grounds with a shotgun, and clearly has either a big secret or is just there for an exposition dump in the final act. (It turns out that he gets to do both.)

Clearly, this film shares some thematic elements with the original, including a woman traumatized by violence who may be going crazy, but almost all of the atmosphere is drained. It’s a film with alternating shots of Katie Holmes looking scared and the doll looking creepy. Rinse and repeat. And it becomes so tediously boring that your mind will wander. (I started to imagine an Annabelle vs. Brahms battle movie.) The biggest problem is that are are no stakes . It’s a ghost story with no ghosts; a slasher pic with no slashing; an atmosphere with no, well, you get it. It’s just a film that’s as blank as Brahms’ expression. And when it finally threatens to fill that space with something interesting? Roll credits before it even gets to 90 minutes. After all, they have to leave something for “The Boy III.”

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

Rated PG-13 for terror, violence, disturbing images and thematic elements.

Katie Holmes as Liza

Christopher Convery as Jude

Owain Yeoman as Sean

Ralph Ineson as Joseph

Anjali Jay as Dr. Lawrence

• William Brent Bell
• Stacey Menear

Cinematographer

• Karl Walter Lindenlaub
• Brian Berdan
• Brett Detar

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Brahms: The Boy II

After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms. After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms. After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms.

• William Brent Bell
• Stacey Menear
• Katie Holmes
• Christopher Convery
• Owain Yeoman
• 309 User reviews
• 117 Critic reviews
• 29 Metascore
• 1 win & 2 nominations

Top cast 15

• Dr. Lawrence

• (uncredited)

• Nurse Receptionist
• Nanny Grace

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia The mansion is really Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, BC. It was used in both movies.
• Goofs Although the guest house was supposed to be set in England, the power sockets and light switches are of US origin.

Jude : [from the trailer] It's okay to be scared sometimes/it's fun to be scared sometimes

[first lines]

Jude : I gottcha good did I

[last lines]

Jude : [looking at his reflection only to see Brahms staring back at him] I think we're gonna like it here Brahms... as long as they follow the rules

• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

User reviews 309

• Feb 24, 2020
• How long is Brahms: The Boy II? Powered by Alexa
• February 21, 2020 (United States)
• United States
• official amazon
• Official Facebook
• Cậu Bé Ma II
• Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (location)
• Lakeshore Entertainment
• Huayi Brothers Media
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $10,000,000 (estimated)
• $12,611,536
• Feb 23, 2020
• $20,311,536

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 26 minutes
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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• DVD & Streaming

Brahms: The Boy II

• Drama , Horror

Content Caution

In Theaters

• February 21, 2020
• Katie Holmes as Liza; Owain Yeoman as Sean; Christopher Convery as Jude; Ralph Ineson as Joseph; Anjali Jay as Dr. Lawrence

Home Release Date

• May 19, 2020
• William Brent Bell

Distributor

• STX Entertainment

Movie Review

When Londoners Liza and son Jude are attacked by masked intruders in the dead of night, the results are what you might expect. Jude is emotionally traumatized—leaving him perpetually cringing at any small disturbance and unable to communicate verbally. And Liza, feeling physically and emotionally battered, is plagued with headaches and nightmares, too.

Liza’s husband, Sean, decides they should make a change. Specifically, moving their family away from the constant reminders of the assault in their London flat. Soon, they head off to the country and rent a lovely guest house situated behind an old, empty manor.

Sure, that manor is rather crumbling and spooky looking. But it’s being renovated by its wealthy-but-absent owner, so there’s no need to worry over it. In fact, there’s no one even around, other than a stalwart groundskeeper who keeps vandals at bay.

It’s all good, and Liza and Jude can finally get some fresh air and wooded-country quiet. It’s a lovely place for Sean to get away and do his writing, too.  

Things do take an odd turn, though, when young Jude finds a half-buried, antique porcelain doll in the woods while the family is out on a walk. I mean, who would bury an old doll like that? And why ? Jude takes an instant liking to the dirt-encrusted thing, so Liza and Sean decide to take it home and clean it up for him to play with.

Yes, the child-sized doll is rather creepy looking with its blank, porcelain-smooth features and natty little suit. But Jude is suddenly more animated around it. And if a strange doll can help the boy break out of his frightened funk, well, maybe it’s worth keeping.

Jude’s therapist agrees. In fact, when Liza and Sean give the woman a call, she praises their choice and sends them some links that suggest dolls can be great ways for traumatized kids to work through their feelings.  

That choice initially seems to be a good one. Jude starts drawing more. He gives the doll the name Brahms . And the boy even writes out a list of made-up rules that will make the doll feel safe. Then Liza and Sean actually overhear Jude talking to the thing. That’s a major breakthrough!

Of course, objective observers looking in from the outside, might not be as excited about a boy and his creepy doll whispering secrets to each other. They might blanch a bit at a family following a doll’s rules. And they’d likely question whether it’s a good thing that a boy and his doll start dressing alike and looking alike.

In fact, any sane Londoner looking on would surely tap Liza and Sean on the shoulder and say …

“’S’cuse me, have either of you ever watched a horror flick on the telly?”

Positive Elements

Parents Liza and Sean obviously love their son and want to do what’s best for him. Common sense, however, doesn’t appear to be their strong suit.

Spiritual Elements

The first movie in this franchise ended with a real-world, physical and psychological reason for the creepy things that happened in it. This one, in contrast, aims more squarely at the idea of possession by a demonic spiritual entity.

At first, the story teases the suggestion that a battered Liza might be suffering from mental trauma, causing her to see things that aren’t really there. But that’s quickly tossed aside, and the doll’s movements and actions are tied directly to a dark spiritual presence. That evil entity moves the doll around, lifts a man aloft and smashes a table.

Liza finds evidence that many families have died in connection with this wicked spirit. In fact, when the porcelain doll’s face is smashed, we see a rotting, corpse-like thing underneath. Eventually, Jude and another person are spiritually possessed by the being.

Sexual Content

Liza wears a thin nightie on several occasions.

Violent Content

When masked thieves break into their flat, Liza and Jude are slammed into walls and manhandled. Liza attempts to fight back before being hit with a heavy object and knocked unconscious. After that, she has several nightmares in which she’s physically grabbed by the throat and slammed up against a wall.

As Jude is slowly possessed by Brahms, the boy’s favorite stuffed bear is torn apart. Then Jude draws pictures of a boy stabbing a dog and killing his parents. (They’re childish crayon sketches include splashes of red blood colored in.) We later see a dog that has indeed been killed and left gutted in the woods; its body is mangled and a bit bloody. Another corpse-like creature sports rotting flesh covered in lice. A young boy falls backward and is impaled through the shoulder on a small, broken and sharp-pointed post. Several adults grab the moaning and writhing child and take him to the hospital.

We see online stories about several families that were brutally murdered. A man gets hit in the face with a shotgun stock and knocked out. Later, that same man is lifted aloft and slammed into a wall on the other side of the room.

A living creature is thrown into a blazing furnace.

Crude or Profane Language

Two s-words are joined by a use of “h—” and a misuse of Christ’s name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Liza and another woman drink wine while talking. Liza and Sean also have wine with their dinner.

Other Negative Elements

Jude’s visiting cousin is a bully who calls him a “nutter” and “mental” while pushing Jude around.

The Boy had little to praise back in 2016. It was barely palatable then, and any positives were thanks to a solid lead performance and a horror-story twist that was only plausible if you tried really, really hard.

However, you’ll have to squint even harder to find a message or meaning in this forgettable sequel. It starts off with a young, emotionally damaged boy finding a creepy, filth-covered porcelain doll buried in the woods, followed by his mom cheerily suggesting they should take it home with them. I mean, at this point, all bets are off. Even the most laissez-faire parent would likely say, “Step away from that nasty thing this instant!” Instead, this mom lets her son cuddle up to it like a pristine plushy, and he starts obeying its secretly whispered list of rules.

After that eye-rolling premise, this horror pic becomes less and less credible—not to mention and less and less watchable —by the second. In fact, its logic heads south with the same speed you’d expect a typical mom to head toward a trash bin with a plastic bag full of gunk-encrusted porcelain doll.

So, as a helpful reviewer, I’ll gently suggest that you step away from this nasty thing this instant, too.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Brahms: the boy ii.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 2 Reviews
• Kids Say 14 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Lifeless, useless horror sequel has violence, jump scares.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Brahms: The Boy II is the sequel to the 2016 horror movie The Boy , about a creepy doll. Violence is the biggest concern and includes a woman being attacked and hit in the head by unseen male intruders (a child sees the whole thing). A dog is shown gutted, a bully is impaled…

Why Age 14+?

A character is attacked, hit in head by two masked people; a child sees the whol

A couple uses of "s--t," a use of "hell," a use of "oh my God." A bully says "sh

Dialogue between troubled married couple includes "you never let me touch you."

Characters drink wine during a family get-together. A character mentions an "ice

Any Positive Content?

No real messages here, except, possibly: Don't dig up strange things in the wood

The characters are very mechanical, serve only to further the plot, so there's n

Violence & Scariness

A character is attacked, hit in head by two masked people; a child sees the whole thing. Gutted dog shown. Bullying. Bully falls backward on pointy wooden stake, piercing upper torso (he lives). Character throws hot candle wax in another's face, hits him with shotgun. Secondary character dies, impaled. A child aims the shotgun (it's not fired). Several jump scares. Child's drawings show blood, acts of violence. Nightmare sequences. Creepy imagery. Murder stories described in internet news search. Arguing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

A couple uses of "s--t," a use of "hell," a use of "oh my God." A bully says "shut up," "this sucks," "you're mental," "nutter."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Dialogue between troubled married couple includes "you never let me touch you." Also hugs, sleeping in same bed, etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink wine during a family get-together. A character mentions an "ice-cold beer." Liquor bottles displayed on a table.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

No real messages here, except, possibly: Don't dig up strange things in the woods. Bad things happen to good people without any rhyme or reason.

Positive Role Models

The characters are very mechanical, serve only to further the plot, so there's no one here to admire or emulate.

Parents need to know that Brahms: The Boy II is the sequel to the 2016 horror movie The Boy , about a creepy doll. Violence is the biggest concern and includes a woman being attacked and hit in the head by unseen male intruders (a child sees the whole thing). A dog is shown gutted, a bully is impaled on a pointy wooden stake (he survives), and another character dies. A man gets hot candle wax in the face and is hit with a shotgun (the shotgun is held by a young boy but never fired). There are also jump scares, nightmare sequences, creepy imagery, murder stories described in the news, and a child's drawings showing blood and violent acts. Language includes a couple uses of "s--t," plus "hell" and "oh my God," as well as a bully's mean taunts. Characters drink wine during a get-together. Sex isn't really an issue. Katie Holmes , Ralph Ineson , and Owain Yeoman star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (14)

Based on 2 parent reviews

They came...

Almost better than the first, what's the story.

In BRAHMS: THE BOY II, a mother, Liza ( Katie Holmes ), is attacked by burglars in front of her young son, Jude ( Christopher Convery ). The traumatic event causes Jude to stop speaking. So his father, Sean ( Owain Yeoman ), decides to move the family to the country to recuperate. They find a beautiful little house (the former guest house of the mansion where the events of The Boy took place) and settle in. Walking in the woods, Jude finds a doll buried in the dirt and digs it up. Jude and the doll, who's called Brahms, become inseparable. Jude announces that there are certain rules to be followed surrounding Brahms, and strange things start happening. Liza must find out what's really going on before the worst happens.

Is It Any Good?

Filled with lifeless characters, basic jump scares, and very little else, this useless horror sequel betrays whatever good ideas the 2016 original had in a poor attempt to create a monster franchise. While The Boy actually told a pretty good, moody story, Brahms: The Boy II ignores it in order to create a Freddy/Jason-like supernatural killer who can be brought back to life in any number of sequels. In other words, this is yet another movie that feels more like a cash-in than a story yearning to be told. And despite some atmospheric cinematography, the movie gets off to a very rough start, with mechanical characters that not even admirable attempts at acting can bring to life.

As Brahms: The Boy II crawls through its amazingly long-winded 86 minutes, it fails to build any sense of dread or give viewers the creeps. The only scares are groaningly typical, including sudden movements in a mirror, sudden "bang!"s on the soundtrack, and the doll opening its mouth really wide while creepy-crawly things fly out of it. (There are also several "it was only a nightmare" scenes.) The movie isn't even bold enough to include any shocks or slayings (except, astoundingly, a murdered dog); even an obnoxious bully gets off fairly easily. With an already crowded slate of evil, killer dolls (Chucky, Annabelle, etc.), perhaps it's best if Brahms goes back in the toy chest for good.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Brahms: The Boy II 's violence . How did it make you feel? How much is shown and/or not shown? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

What's the appeal of scary movies ?

What's the relationship like between Jude and his parents? What happens when they disagree? How is this similar to (or different from) times you've disagreed with your parents (or children)?

What were your feelings toward the bully character? How is he dealt with? What other ways are there of dealing with bullies?

How does this sequel compare with the 2016 original?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 21, 2020
• On DVD or streaming : April 3, 2020
• Cast : Katie Holmes , Owain Yeoman , Christopher Convery
• Director : William Brent Bell
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : STX Entertainment
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 86 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : violence, terror, brief strong language and thematic elements
• Last updated : July 16, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Brahms: The Boy II review – the sequel nobody expected

Brahms: The Boy II is the sequel nobody expected and ends up being an improvement on the original.

Brahms: The Boy II see the return of both director William Brent Bell and writer Stacey Menear, as they are joined by a new cast that includes Katie Holmes ( Batman Begins ), Owain Yeoman ( American Sniper ) and Christopher Convery ( The Girl in the Spider’s Web ) as we follow a new family that moves into Heelshire Mansion.

Brahms: The Boy II follows a family, mother Liza (Holmes), husband Sean (Yeoman), and son Jude (Convery), who have experienced a burglary gone wrong and look to try and rebuild after the trauma of the events leave Jude as a mute and Liza suffering nightmares about what happened. The house is one of the guesthouses on the same land as the Heelshire Mansion, and Jude discovers the Brahms doll, bringing it back to the house, with the parents seeing it as a chance for him to heal in his own way. When Jude gets more attached to the doll, it becomes clear the change in him, only the parents don’t know whether it is helping or not until they learn the truth behind the sinister doll.

Brahms: The Boy II follows up the original The Boy starring Lauren Cohan ( The Walking Dead ) with a trailer that only went against everything we saw in the first film. Now, this could have just been a decoy or an attempt to cash-in on the creepy doll era of horror we are going through, with the likes of the Annabelle franchise finally going strong, the multiple versions of Chucky out there, and even Puppet Master trying to make a return. Brahms: The Boy II does change the game created in the first film, which if we are honest has a much lighter tone for the first two thirds, with the babysitting job being set around the idea of looking after a doll, which might have seemed odd but offered up a romantic storyline for somebody who thought they hit the jackpot of easy jobs. This time we get a family who have experienced a trauma, needing to try and fix the aftermath between them, which is easily the best part of the film because it offers up a couple of potential paths the story could go down, be it Liza’s head injury causing more reaction or Jude just wanting something new to communicate with. This is where the problem lies: the story sets up a couple of potential endings which could be interesting and surprising but instead decides to try and cash in on something bigger, which changes everything we learned in the first film to give us a more franchise-ready story which doesn’t get close to the quality in the other aforementioned doll-centric movies.

Brahms: The Boy II shows that Katie Holmes is returning to the horror genre and along with Christopher Convery being very creepy are the best two performances in the film. Like most horror films the husband or father just doesn’t get enough to do other than being the good guy in arguments or not there when something creepy or scary happens. We do have one of the most annoying evil kids in any film, with limited screen time; you would just want to punch the kid for his actions.

Brahms: The Boy II is a horror that does give us the jump scares we are expecting, though we know when they will happen, without giving us enough suspense beforehand. The film attempts to give us a bigger mystery, which goes against what we learned, ending up getting the generic research scene which starts simple and only gets more in-depth as the film goes on, be it on the computer or through hearing stories, which only seems to make the original The Boy movie feel like an opening sequence to this one.

Overall Brahms: The Boy II is a generic horror mystery that is clearly trying to make itself into a franchise to try and compete with an Annabelle , only it decides to spin everything the first film had on its head and leave us all scratching our own heads in turn, largely with the reaction of why did we even watch the first film when we could have just started with this one.

Article by Jonathon Wilson

Jonathon is one of the co-founders of Ready Steady Cut and has been an instrumental part of the team since its inception in 2017. Jonathon has remained involved in all aspects of the site’s operation, mainly dedicated to its content output, remaining one of its primary Entertainment writers while also functioning as our dedicated Commissioning Editor, publishing over 6,500 articles.

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Brahms: The Boy II Reviews

Nonsensical and unimaginative, the sequel offends on almost all counts. Even as a standalone, it's dull and rash. If this movie is an attempt at building a franchise, it's a poor jump-off.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 20, 2023

A dreadful trudge through dodgy horror clichés.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 11, 2021

Entertaining horror film, with a diabolical doll included, for an afternoon of scares, and little else. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5.3/10 | Jan 4, 2021

Trope after trope after trope.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Oct 12, 2020

The first gave a fresh an unexpected twist. In the Boy II, filmmakers (same writer/director) decided to conform and step back in the horror cliche lines and make Brahms more stereotypical and uninteresting. What a shame.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Jul 15, 2020

The biggest problem with Brahms: The Boy II is that there is almost nothing in the movie that is fresh or original.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2020

Most of the budget seem to have gone on Holmes' salary, as Brahms may have the least special effects of any horror film ever made.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 19, 2020

Brahms: The Boy II has good intentions, but they get lost in the middle. We shall hope we won't have to experience a third boy because one of them is really enough.

Full Review | May 4, 2020

The performances by the main characters are acceptable, however no amount of talent or scenery can outweigh this film's mediocrity.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2020

It is appreciated that it doesn't abuse of cheap scares, but it also doesn't make up for it with good horror scenes. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 12, 2020

A lackluster sequel to a lackluster original...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 6, 2020

What the film's director William Brent Bell and writer Stacey Menear do get right, however, is Brahms's ability to endear himself to those around him.

Full Review | Mar 6, 2020

This just didn't even hold a candle to the first. The premise was good and could have delivered, but in the simplest way to say it, it just didn't.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.9/10 | Mar 5, 2020

Awful, just terrible. Lacklustre in all departments, lacking in scares, atmosphere and tension with abysmal CGI and, as a final nail in the coffin, it's actually rather boring.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/10 | Mar 5, 2020

Alternative title...Braums: The Boy 2 Ending Explained, but it's really not complicated enough to warrant an explanation.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2020

This was stupid. Stupid. What was that I just saw? Ridiculous.

Watching Brahms: The Boy II, one gets the feeling that the picture was only made on a dare.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 29, 2020

Quoth the other, more bewhiskered and musically inclined Brahms, "The only true immortality lies in one's children." Oh, Johannes, if only you knew.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Feb 27, 2020

Filled with lifeless characters, basic jump-scares, and very little else, this useless horror sequel betrays whatever good ideas the 2016 original had in a poor attempt to create a monster franchise.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 27, 2020

Brahms: The Boy II simply doesn't work, an uninteresting and uninspired offering that is absent of scares. It's no lullaby, but it will still put you to sleep.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 26, 2020

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Movie Review – Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

February 23, 2020 by Shaun Munro

Brahms: The Boy II , 2020.

Directed by William Brent Bell. Starring Katie Holmes, Ralph Ineson, Owain Yeoman, and Christopher Convery.

After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms.

The grand tradition of horror movie sequels dictates that, more often than not, they listlessly recycle that original success for as many go-arounds as audiences will still part with their money.

Yet 2016’s low-budget genre hit The Boy evidently wrote itself into a corner in that regard, given that the film’s single subversive and creative idea was the reveal that, in fact, the supposedly haunted porcelain doll named Brahms wasn’t really controlled by a malevolent spirit at all. Rather, the doll was being surreptitiously manipulated by the real adult Brahms, who secretly resided within the walls of Heelshire Mansion and crept out to do his bidding when nobody was around.

The first film ended with Brahms very much alive, so it’s immediately peculiar that the clunkily-titled follow-up,  Brahms: The Boy II , more or less forgets this while effectively ret-conning the non-supernatural rug-pull and once again suggesting that, yes, the doll is indeed possessed.

It’s an especially incongruous decision given that this sequel was written and directed by the same team behind the original – Stacey Menear and William Brent Bell – so to see them discarding their own established mythology so intently doesn’t set a promising tone from the outset.

This is ultimately just one of several head-scratching creative calls in a movie that can’t ever bring itself to play fair with the viewer about its rules, cheaply holding viewers at arm’s length from them for the bulk of the lean 86-minute runtime.

It’s established early on in the film that Brahms can now move around of his own free will, yet Bell plays the conceit infuriatingly coyly, only ever showing the aftermath of Brahms’ movements, such that audiences are likely to feel short-changed by the patent lack of invention – if not outright laziness – on display.

If circling back to the killer doll premise suggested by the first two acts of the original movie was really the idea that writer and director were married to, why not go full Child’s Play and commit to a CGI doll running around murdering people? And before you consider it a budgetary decision to keep Brahms’ actions almost entirely off-screen, remember that last year’s Child’s Play reboot had the very same $10 million price tag.

Even accepting  Brahms: The Boy II for what it is rather than what it isn’t, it’s a low-energy, generic horror jaunt through and through, focused on two parents (Katie Holmes and Owain Yeoman) who move into the Heelshire Mansion with their son Jude (Christopher Convery), who has been rendered mute since a home invasion several months prior. Jude soon enough unearths Brahms in the nearby woods, and before long, creepiness abounds.

Though Bell clearly knows his way around a camera as evidenced by the film’s surprisingly handsome camerawork, he has little idea of how to elevate the painfully formulaic set-pieces, which largely amount to a character slowly skulking around an area of the house before turning around to meet an obnoxious jump scare. Use of both loud tension chords and negative space are laughably unimaginative, and underline a film that will terrorise few beyond their mid-teen years.

If there’s any one aspect that’s beyond reproach, it’s surely the film’s performances, all of which are uniformly solid. Katie Holmes is especially convincing here as a concerned mother who becomes increasingly exasperated with indulging her son’s “friendship” with Brahms, and there’s also a fun supporting role for character actor Ralph Ineson as the mansion’s eccentric groundskeeper Joseph. The performers do their best to make the moldy dialogue work, and acquit themselves admirably enough as a result.

But it all comes down to the script, and even through its exceptionally silly climax, it is a film bereft of even the basic inspiration of the original’s expectation-defying finale. If a third entry into the franchise indeed materialises, as the ending of this one heavily implies it will, the setup is even more desperately lazy than this film’s shameless continuity-rejig.

Brahms: The Boy II moves fast enough not to bore and is anchored by the efforts of a quality cast it doesn’t deserve, but is otherwise proof perfect that horror sequels which deviate from the original can still find new ways to be cynical and idiotic.

Flippantly disregarding the previous film’s continuity while failing to establish its own clear internal logic, Brahms: The Boy II is sure to baffle fans and newcomers alike.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Shaun Munro – Follow me on  Twitter  for more film rambling.

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‘Brahms: The Boy II’ Review: A Sequel No One Needed Inside a Thriller No One Will Understand

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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Confusion is baked right into the title. Four years after “ The Boy ” scared up a few bucks at the box office, director William Brent Bell and screenwriter Stacey Menear return with a new vision of what fresh terrors said boy (he’s a doll, okay, why did no one just call this movie “The Doll” and be done with it?) will enact on yet another unsuspecting family. Why “Brahms”? That’s the doll’s name, or the boy’s name (there’s also a boy in the first film, kind of), which might remind moviegoers of the nutso line-blurring in “The Boy.” However, “Brahms” also indicates what Bell and Menear really hope to accomplish: a full retcon of the original that does away with a dizzying amount of given information in service to a cheap sequel and the possibility of continuing a franchise for a film that never expected have one.

There wasn’t much original in Bell and Menear’s first crack at the creepy-doll horror genre, but “The Boy” had a sense of humor and a grasp on its wackily warped mythology that earned a few real chills and a couple of genuine laughs. None of that for “ Brahms: The Boy II ”; instead, it tucks into trauma, and the divide is so sharp that savvy audiences might wonder if some penny-pinching executive took a wholly unrelated spec script and tried to make it conform to Brahms’ icky contortions.

If only the film itself was that twisted! “Brahms: The Boy II” opens with some promise as a horrifying home invasion damages both Liza ( Katie Holmes ) and her cute kid Jude (Christopher Convery), setting up solid character work and a sense of unease that goes beyond the dull moments of “look, here is a creepy doll” that sledgehammers the rest of the film. Liza is a refreshingly pragmatic and strong leading lady, the kind of horror character who fights back (and means it) and is smart enough to to say, “Look, that is a creepy doll” (and definitely mean that, too).

Jude has a lot going on, from the “selective mutism” that he slips into after the attack to an eventual semi-possession by Brahms that might lead another young performer into more broad territory (hell, give Convery an award for how many times he has to carry Brahms around, lightly telegraphing his growing horror with every slump of his shoulders). The family unit is completed with Owain Yeoman as husband and father Sean (apparently last to the personality buffet, he’s easily overshadowed by co-stars both human and porcelain). Intent on reclaiming some semblance of normalcy after their trauma, the trio decamp for a country house (it’s on the same grounds as the same mansion in which “The Boy” played out, but so charming that Liza and Sean don’t Google its screwed-up history before moving on in). Here’s hoping that the fresh air and sprawling nature will reset them all.

Then Jude finds Brahms. The doll is an undoubtedly creepy vessel, but there’s also something inherently funny about his pale visage, and for every shot of him that chills, others stir up titters. Even his first appearance is darkly hilarious, his little pale hand sticking out of the ground like a teensy corpse begging for help. That Jude, a kid in an admittedly weird place in his life, would spark to the obviously deeply haunted toy, isn’t much of a hard sell, and Menear’s script works overtime to ensure Liza and Sean feel as if they need to go along with their tiny new houseguest. Jude starts talking again, but only to the doll, and that’s enough of a positive change to push his parents to accept Brahms as some kind of inanimate therapist.

Then things get weird, and the family begins to corrode at even faster clip. Liza’s mental and emotional state makes for a smart counterpoint to the whims of the bonkers doll, but Bell and Menear approach it from an awkward vantage: We know Brahms brings evil with him, and so while we might have some doubts around Liza’s perspective (a series of shoddy nightmare sequences remind us of her apparent unreliability as a narrator), we’re never not on her side. That’s sort of how sequels work, with built-in knowledge that can be expanded upon, not condensed and confused. However, that’s not how “Brahms: The Boy II”works, preferring to weave Liza and Jude’s trials (which are good enough for their own original movie) inside a mythology that gets messier by the minute.

There aren’t that many minutes to mess up, but the film manages to make it feel much longer. At just 86 minutes, “Brahms: The Boy II” should fly by, but the film lurches forward with its momentum punctuated by bad jump scares and odd flashback sequences. It all leads up to an assortment of exposition-heavy scenes that clarify nothing: Yes, you might remember that the first film was really about a creepy man  (a former boy) who used a very creepy doll to, well, basically be creepy, but what if it was really the doll  pulling all the strings? Fans of the first film won’t get it, newbies won’t understand it, and no one will be surprised when it all adds up to an ending that dares wink at the possibility of yet another film. Maybe that one will be built as well as the indestructible doll that haunts this incoherent franchise.

“Brahms: The Boy II” is now in theaters. 

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Brahms: The Boy II Review: An Unnecessary Sequel That Undermines The Original

Horror movies and sequels go hand in hand. Depending on the franchise (I'm looking at you, Saw , Friday The 13th and Halloween ), there can be numerous avenues sequels can take, with varying degrees of quality. Horror movie or not, it’s usually better to let the dead rest, and such is the case with Brahms: The Boy II . Overdone jumps cares, poor performances and disregard of the original make Brahms: The Boy II a forlorn attempt at a sequel.

Brahms: The Boy II is the latest sequel to 2016’s The Boy , a film directed by William Brent Bell. (There are spoilers for The Boy here, but not for Brahms: The Boy II , so venture forth accordingly.) In The Boy , Greta Evans ( Lauren Cohan ) works for the wealthy Heelshires, who have a supposedly haunted doll that must be cared for like a real person. Eventually, it’s revealed the doll isn’t actually haunted. Rather, it’s the once-thought dead Heelshire son, also named Brahms, who has been living in the walls and tormenting guests via the doll. In the end, Brahms is presumably killed, only later revealed to be piecing together his old destroyed doll.

In short, the supposedly haunted doll is not haunted. Brahms is just the toy of a crazy man child, also named Brahms, living in the walls.

Enter 2020’s Brahms: The Boy II . William Brent Bell is back as the director and so is that damn doll. Liza ( Katie Holmes ) lives a busy life in the city with her husband Sean (Owain Yeoman) and their son Jude (Christopher Convery). One night, when Sean is working late their family home is broken into by two masked men. Liza suffers a serious head wound while defending Jude, but survives. After the attack, Liza lives with frequent migraines and Jude takes a vow of silence communicating only with handwritten notes. Sean and Liza are both at odds with one another trying to get over the home invasion and Jude's silence. In search of a solution, they decide to spend some time in the country to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

The trip starts off great, but as the family explores the woods, they discover the old Heelshire mansion abandoned. Shortly after, Jude comes across the Brahms doll buried deep in the woods. He quickly bonds with Brahms and even starts talking to him, but not his parents. From there, things start to get spooky as Jude insists they follow Brahms' rules or else.

Brahms: The Boy II is full of cheap, shallow scares.

Although there are a few creepy scenes, Brahms: The Boy II relies too heavily on telegraphed jump scares. Every ten minutes or so, like clockwork, there is some sort of knee jerk ‘boo!’, whether that comes from a dog, the doll or even Jude himself. After the first five of these scares or so, you get bored and can spot them coming from a mile away.

There is some redeemable horror here though. Any way you look at it, that doll is horrifying. It’s just too realistic that it heads into uncanny valley, which Director William Brent Bell uses to the film's advantage. There are subtle effects, such as the doll slowly smiling in the background, that really enhance the horror. However, they are used at every opportunity and become far too telegraphed, just like jump scares throughout the film.

Poor performances out of Christopher Convery and Owain Yoeman hurt Brahms: The Boy II.

In Brahms: The Boy II , the subtlety ends with the doll. Most of the performances from the cast are downright bad. On one end, there’s Christopher Convery, who doesn’t even speak for the majority of the film. Nearly all interactions with his character boil down to him writing ‘Brahms didn’t like that’ and then scowling at his parents. While creepy at first, this quickly gets old.

Then there is Sean, the father, played by Owain Yeoman. He puts on an exceptionally indifferent performance. His lines are delivered as nonchalantly as one would leave for a pack of smokes and never come back. You start to wonder if this guy really even cares about Jude or Liza, or just his work. He calls his son 'mate,' like he’s some old high school buddy. It’s jarring and odd to be honest.

Katie Holmes gives a serviceable performance as a traumatized mother. However, the real star of the show is Ralph Ineson, who plays Joseph the groundskeeper. He comes out of absolutely nowhere and gives a gravelly voiced performance reminiscent of his character in The Witch . It’s pretty good and one of the few redeemable aspects of Brahms: The Boy II .

Brahms: The Boy II takes everything that made the original special and throws it out the window.

The biggest issue with Brahms: The Boy II isn’t the cheap scares or the lackluster performances. The sequel takes everything that made The Boy special and throws it all out of the window. To take the approach that something supernatural was real all along is arguably just as creepy, if not more so. That’s why films like Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are so horrifying. These are real situations that could actually happen. The Boy was a bait and switch exercise that was amplified by the reveal of Brahms living in the wall. There was no supernatural element at all, the horror was in something real that appeared supernatural. That established plot is completely abandoned this time around.

Brahms: The Boy II is far too reliant on the supernatural to glaze over plot holes and render character motivations useless. It just feels like lazy writing and a detraction from its predecessor. The disregard for the magic of The Boy , poor performances and unoriginal scares ultimately make Brahms: The Boy II just another failed horror sequel.

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The dumb title is the best part of the sodden horror sequel Brahms: The Boy II

And it discards the only good things about its predecessor, The Boy

by Charles Bramesco

The title of the new horror dud Brahms: The Boy II raises some questions the film can’t answer. It flouts all conventions of sequel-naming, appending serious-business Roman numerals to the title of its 2016 predecessor The Boy , while also tacking on the name of the franchise’s breakout villain for maximum brand recognition. Discounting the overreaching attempt to have it both ways — you either rebrand or you don’t! — why awkwardly stuff the Brahms before the semicolon? It’s on par with referring to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors as Freddy Krueger: A Nightmare on Elm Street III . Like a porcelain figurine turning its head and blinking, it simply doesn’t look right.

So it’s a grim sign that this clunky title turns out to be the most distinctive, memorable element of the film.

Viewers may expend more brain power than necessary on that title as they wait for the tedious, wholly unnecessary Brahms, Too! to end. Seemingly born from a mandate that all genre releases passing a certain box-office benchmark automatically receive the franchise treatment, this continuation extends a story that was already stretched a bit thin in The Boy .

Director William Brent Bell’s first swing at the material pulled a minor bait-and-switch by billing itself as an evil-toy picture, then revealing itself as a gaslight picture. A nanny was driven insane by Brahms, the creepy doll supposedly housing the soul of the prematurely deceased son of the English manor’s owners. But Bell took care to stage each fright in order to sustain the final revelation that the actual culprit was the real Brahms, alive and skittering around the walls. Though the film was no great shakes, that final segment introducing the bona fide Brahms had serious potential, in both the character’s lanky physicality and his eerie baby-mask.

Bell’s biggest gaffe with the sequel is abandoning everything he’d already built to needlessly rewrite the mythos. Brahm and Brahmer 2 sends an entire family to the same haunted house, and this time, the supernatural menace has a basis in the film’s reality. Brahms the man is nowhere to be seen, and Brahms the object can now move, cause havoc, and apparently possess the souls of the innocent. More frustrating than the hazy nature of the character’s abilities is Bell’s refusal to depict them in action. Watching a foot-tall plaything flip over a dinner table would be either hilarious or terrifying, and either direction would be an improvement over the flavorless slurry Bell is dishing up.

Echoing Midsommar , the film begins with a prologue of familial tragedy leaving a deep scar of trauma. A home invasion plays out while Dad (Owain Yeoman) is off working. Masked intruders brutalize Mom (Katie Holmes), while her son Jude (Christopher Convery) can do nothing but watch, leaving the kid with understandable psychological distress that he expresses as selective mutism. Stacey Menear’s script then delves into Pediatric Therapy 101, as Dr. Exposition (Anjali Jay) informs the unhappy couple that their son needs an external outlet of some sort to provide him with a safe conduit for emotional expression. He might as well be begging to get mentally subsumed by a demonic collectible.

Following the migration of so many doomed scary-movie families before them, they flee the toxic scramble of “the city” for the wholesome serenity of “the country,” both spaces defined as vaguely as possible. Their real-estate agent neglected to mention the events of Brahms 1: The Boy I in her sales pitch, however, and she leaves the spouses to fend for themselves as the resident specter seeps out of the doll and into their son. The metaphor — a once-cheery youngster is overtaken by malevolence, prone to sudden, inexplicable outbursts — is clear, though not particularly original. Here’s another instance in which keeping everything earthbound would’ve worked to the film’s advantage; instead of really reckoning with the inner workings of little Jude, the film can write his behavior off as magical jiggery-pokery with a simple fix.

Snatches of eccentricity sneak in to the midsection, a mass of flab even as it occupies a fraction of the film’s slim 86-minute total. Reliable character actor Ralph Ineson perks up his scenes as the obligatory spooky groundskeeper, the only performer aware of the minor-chord pipe-organ music implied in all their dialogue. Pound for pound, the setpieces don’t hit so hard, with the marked exception of one sequence involving a broken croquet stake, shot largely through an upstairs window overlooking the lawn. The distancing effect gives the impression of deliberate creative action that’s otherwise absent from Bell’s indifferently-shot games of gotcha. (Sticking a jump-scare dream sequence inside a jump-scare dream sequence should be punishable by a hefty fine.)

Bell has somehow made a career for himself out of upward failure. Stay Alive , Disney’s dismal attempt at breaking into the slasher market, drew toxic reviews and box-office receipts to match. His little-seen Wer got a Japanese release in 2013, before getting shuffled into the direct-to-video bin in the States. Despite another round of panning, The Devil Inside kept him employable by proving he could pull a massive payday out of a sleepy late-winter release date, hence The Boy and its unholy offspring.

He could probably continue to coast like this for the foreseeable future, churning out another broad horror concept every couple years, for release on an uncompetitive weekend. This past week brought the news that he’ll soon tackle a prequel to 2009’s Orphan , another opportunity for a lucrative phone-in. But at least the film’s working title is simply Esther , and not Esther: Orphan II .

Brahms: The Boy II is in theaters now.

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Brahms: The Boy II Review

Brahms: The Boy II favors a benefit not all sequels can boast: the retaining of original creative parties. Writer Stacey Menear and director William Brent Bell both return in their respective roles after 2016’s The Boy , yet I’m not positive their initial cinematic experience left a lasting impression. Granted, Brahms’ second familial infiltration does dare to be different – by completely retconning The Boy ’s canonical third act. Please, weaponize creativity, but ensure continuity flows between franchise entries. We’re not even on “Part IIV” where Brahms blasts into space or the prequel where Brahms goes to old-timey English college. You can’t even keep your storytelling straight for two consecutive films?

Brahms’ newest targets are city folk looking to escape metropolitan hustles and recent traumas. One night while Sean (Owain Yeoman) worked late, wife Liza (Katie Holmes) and son Jude (Christopher Convery) found themselves victims of a violent break-in. The event causes Jude to go mute while Liza suffers recurring nightmares, so Sean suggests skipping town for a countryside recharge. Unfortunately, they rent the Heelshire estate’s guest house, where Jude befriends reassembled Brahms – the doll – buried and waiting for another owner. New household, new rules, new danger.

Let’s just say it’s a Friday The 13th scenario where “Part II” alters the (recorded) history of, well, who’s doing the killing. Differentiation is commendable, especially when The Boy leaves room for a follow-up with generic intentions – but the lack of ambition here is as discouraging as flatlined execution. Bell’s own interview quotes suggest Brahms: The Boy II reimagines how the doll can alternately affect different families, yet backstory flashbacks still laboriously latch themselves to Brahms’ dated crime spree. The Heelshire’s are still mentioned and precise shots from The Boy ’s final sequence are reused. Menear overwrites previously plotted facts like we won’t notice. It’s all very sloppy and stupifying, as Brahms once again shatters but this time with a vastly random and befuddling result.

You had two roads to follow when mapping this sequel. Either completely disconnect yourself and design something like an anthology series where Brahms: The Boy II has NOTHING to do with The Boy , or stick to your guns and return to a world rife with unfinished business. Bell tries to accomplish both, doing no favors to anyone who – like myself – rewatched The Boy in preparation for 2020’s delayed second “haunting.”

What’s worse, horror is cautiously muted given how Brahms: The Boy II projects evilness onto the doll itself. We’ve gone from “it’s a man in the walls” to “just kidding, the doll really is possessed” in a Child’s Play type switcheroo – yet Jude is still corrupted. I’m not positive why Brahms didn’t murder on his own, but that’s not what Menear’s script is here to answer nor what Bell’s vision chooses to showcase. Instead, we’re granted plenty of pitter-patter sounds as miniature custom doll shoes scamper out of sight, or Brahms’ slow spooky head turn. Horror blueprints largely occur out of frame and cannot sustain enough atmospheric dread to deliver on Liza’s subplot of sounding like a raving lunatic to her husband.

In true “underwhelming horror” fashion, there’s a bit of dimwittery about the entire narrative. A boy finds a doll in the woods, the two become inseparable, and parents idly watch as problematic shit goes down. “Plausibility” earns a modicum of good faith by Jude using Brahms as an outlet to vocalize speech for the first time in months – hence why Liza and Sean allow the devilishly handsome Brahms to stay – but let’s just say Liza shouldn’t be applying for an FBI position anytime soon.

When attempting to connect fragile Brahms to whispered tragedies of her current property’s past, she locates a “Mould” number on the doll’s foot, scribbled down as “606H.” It yields no results on some random internet database, so she crumples her authentication code and shuts her laptop. It’s at that moment I muttered to myself “turn the paper upsidedown,” and knew it’d be another thirtyish minutes – at the “perfect” climactic moment – when Liza would, indeed, realize the number is “H909.” Well, reader, let me tell you how hard I laughed when exactly that happened, just to allow for some more ignorant Brahms aggression that barely tops any Puppet Master sequel.

I’m sure Katie Holmes was drawn to the role of Liza because of the mental anguish arc of a scarred survivor, but Brahms: The Boy II isn’t bold enough to magnify a troubled mother who ignores personal health for her son’s benefit. Owain Yeoman isn’t given more than sidepiece dialogue as a “businessman” who stays late because of “deadlines” and panders to Brahms’ unbelievable personality. You’ll get one or two unsettling “creepy kid” shots as Christopher Convery goes “Full Brahms” (suit, scowl, distrust in his deceptively innocent adolescent gaze), and Ralph Ineson does his best as a purposefully vaguely-talkin’ groundskeeper who’s always carrying a loaded shotgun. They’re all just puppets under Brahms’ control; a wooden villain who attempts to rewrite his own infamy but fails in mundane fashion.

William Brent Bell is going for Victorian chills with paranormal subtext, but Brahms: The Boy II is a sensationless and forgettable homecoming. You’ll leave with more questions than answers, thanks to scripting that itself would love to bury The Boy , never again to be referenced. Brahms dares to reinvent himself, but choices do nothing except unnecessarily complicate truths that are quite certain in The Boy . Oh, and it’s also just a boring-as-sin horror tale whether you view it as an illogical sequel or humdrum standalone. A boy, his doll, and maybe a flipped dinner table or two. More like Dolly Dumbest if you ask me.

[Review] ‘Brahms: The Boy II’ is a Playdate with Generic and Predictable Horror

In 2016’s  The Boy , writer Stacey Menear and director William Brent Bell subverted the killer doll mold with a horror movie that dared not to have a killer doll at all. Throughout, the film teased the possibility of one, possessed by its former owner, Brahms, only to reveal that it was a mere distraction from a more bizarre truth. Brahms never died in the first place; he merely retreated into the walls of the sprawling mansion until his parents could hand deliver a chosen companion. With the shocking twist laid bare and Brahms’ story at its conclusion, how do you keep an audience engaged for a sequel? Not very well, it turns out.

The setup is simple; a home invasion that leaves a family reeling from trauma prompts them to move to the countryside to recoup. Son Jude ( Christopher Convery ) remains mute, mom Liza ( Katie Holmes ) suffers from headaches and nightmares, and dad Sean ( Owain Yeoman ) has no clue how to help – he was away on business when the attack occurred. It turns out that their new cottage home is on the outskirts of the former Heelshire mansion, and Jude stumbles upon the Brahms doll in the nearby woods. Brahms wastes no time implementing his rules, and Jude’s behavior grows increasingly worrisome.

While  The Boy  chose to explore a creepy doll movie with no actual creepy doll,  Brahms: The Boy II   decides to revert to generic spooky doll fare. The jig is already up with Brahms’ original puppeteer, but instead of letting ambiguity build mystery or tension, Menear and Bell get straight to the clichés of supernatural hauntings. Whispered voices lure Jude to the exact location of the doll in the woods. Movement out of the corner of the eye that’s just subtle enough to suggest the eye is playing tricks. Then subtlety and finesse go straight out the window; the doll runs amok in the house. Furniture movement, shifting doll eyes, the cliched music stings, and the jump scares that accompany haunted dolls all play out predictably.

There’s no real suspense or stakes, either. It’s clear where this is headed, and there’s no sense of danger or new takes on tried and true tropes to refresh this familiar tale. The only character that offers any sense of mystery is Ralph Ineson as the estate’s caretaker Joseph. At first, it seems the character’s sole purpose is to relay exposition until a scene that arrives far too late gives him much needed scenery to chew. The climax does attempt to provide us with a shocking visual reveal to match the bonkers entrance of Brahms in the first film, but it’s not as well-executed nor does it go full throttle on the horror. It’s more a half-hearted tease of what the film should have been doing all along.

Ultimately,  Brahms: The Boy II gives plenty of exposition that allows it to work as a standalone; if you haven’t seen the original you’ll still be fine. It even tries to contradict a lot of what made The Boy work, to its detriment. This sequel succeeds in making Brahms less playful, and much more threatening. But the way the horror operates here makes those threats feel empty. The plot beats and scares all feel stale. The horror plays much too safe. The idea of giving audiences exactly what they thought they were getting in the first film seems smart on paper, but this sequel is too afraid to take any real risks. Brahms might have made for a fun playdate before, but his game has become all too predictable.

Horror journalist, RT Top Critic, and Critics Choice Association member. Co-Host of the Bloody Disgusting Podcast. Has appeared on PBS series' Monstrum, served on the SXSW Midnighter shorts jury, and moderated horror panels for WonderCon and SeriesFest.

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Read This Before You See Brahms: The Boy II

While by no means a massive critical or commercial success,  The Boy was still one of the strangest and most enigmatic mainstream horror films of 2016. The film's insane third act twist certainly divided audiences, and the old-school, throwback horror that it delivered arguably felt tame by some modern standards, but those who loved it seriously loved it . And they continue to. 

In 2016, the film's director, William Brent Bell, suggested that a sequel was "certainly possible" if it seemed as though "the audience wants to see another movie." Having hauled in a global box office of $64 million on a budget of $10 million, it certainly seemed like moviegoers wanted more Brahms, more Heelshire Home, and more of that crazy porcelain doll. Fortunately, fans can expert some deliciously dark doll vibes with the sequel, Brahms: The Boy II . However, if you missed out on the first movie, need a refresher on the original film, or want a primer for part two, then we've got you covered. This is everything you need to know about Brahms: The Boy II  before it finally smashes out of the walls.

Fair warning: There are massive spoilers for The Boy ahead! 

The Boy ended on a crazy cliffhanger

Before we discuss the sequel, let's recap the original film. In The Boy , an American nanny named Greta ( Lauren Cohan of The Walking Dead ) is hired by an eccentric rich family, the Heelshires, for a very unconventional job. They want her to care for a porcelain doll named Brahms. It's a career move that any sane person would naturally run a mile from, but okay . On top of handing Greta a very specific set of rules by which to care for the doll (including talking to "him" in a loud voice and freezing his food if he doesn't eat it), it also turns out that the real Brahms was the son of the Heelshires, and he was killed in a house fire 20 years ago on his eighth birthday after one of his young friends was found in the forest with her skull crushed. Suspicious, right?

Naturally, Greta ignores the rules and only starts to take them seriously when the doll begins to take on a life of its own. Brahms seemingly moves on his own, and a child's voice and sobs can be heard across the mansion. Skip to the end, and Greta discovers that, lo and behold, the real Brahms has been alive and well, and he's now a grown man who's been living in the walls of the house. A tussle ensues, and Greta eventually stabs him with a screwdriver and flees the estate. But as we discover later, Brahms has survived. And he's busy repairing his shattered doll. Enter  Brahms: The Boy II .

New characters, same old creepy doll

Greta might've escaped, but it seems that the Heelshire house might still be housing Brahms, and that he and his doll are still very much out to torment whoever occupies the mansion next. As we know from the first film, Brahms is still alive, and both he and his doll won't let tiny things like flesh wounds or broken porcelain stop them. 

In Brahms: The Boy II , a young family will be moving into the Heelshire Mansion with no knowledge of the dark history of the place (though, fyi, people should probably do a Google deep dive on creepy old mansions before they enthusiastically move themselves into them). As the plot synopsis outlines , the young son of the family will find and befriend the spooky porcelain doll. Considering that the first film showed the Heelshires harboring plans to turn Greta into a mate for the real Brahms (complete with making a porcelain doll based on her image), this spells some pretty terrible things for this particular young boy who will be unaware of the malevolent force he may be inviting into his life. 

The original director and screenwriter are returning

Horror filmmaker William Brent Bell and screenwriter Stacey Menear are back for the sequel, which is great news for fans of the first film who would likely want for this sequel to retain all the same vibes they loved about The Boy . Though both remained tight-lipped about Brahms: The Boy II  during production, it's definitely interesting that Bell and Menear have spoken about how they ended the first film to purposefully set up the groundwork for a sequel. 

While Bell hinted to Daily Dead that "the sequel will be a complex little story to deliver on what the first movie delivered" back in 2016, Menear told Cosmopolitan that he was already toying with an idea. The screenwriter revealed that because the first film "was based on a twist," now "there's a lot of other interesting stuff" that he feels more open to "focus on" since the audience already knows the twist going into the sequel. All in all, it gives the impression that both of them are more confident and eager to build upon the creepy world they introduced in the first movie. And it sounds like they have a lot of intriguing ideas about what Brahms will be up to next.

Katie Holmes is leading the film

Former Dawson's Creek  cast member Katie Holmes is playing Liza, a mother who moves into the mansion with her husband and young son. As a real-life mother to a young daughter, Holmes didn't have to dig too deeply into the role of a terrified mom who watches her son be drawn in by sinister forces. In June 2019, Holmes told Entertainment Weekly , "I felt like this was a story about a mother and her child and this evil presence that's influencing her child, and how that's a universal fear for every parent."

But there's also another universal fear that Holmes apparently discovered during the making of the film: dolls. They'll get you every time. In an interview with Access Hollywood , Holmes stated that working on the movie was "very creepy" and especially so when she was "working one-on-one with the doll." Stating that she "loved dolls growing up," the actor revealed that the experience of having to act opposite such a malevolent little monster as doll-Brahms made her feel like the experience was "really ruining dolls" for her. Fingers crossed that Brahms: The Boy II  also wonderfully ruins dolls for the rest of us, too. 

That doll is up to no good

First-look pictures from Brahms: The Boy II  revealed some fairly sinister happenings taking place in the Heelshire house against the poor new family who've moved in there. In February 2019, a picture was released showing the porcelain doll buried in dirt, with what looks like the young son of the family covering the doll's mouth with his hand. It's interesting to note from the sleeves of the young boy's suit that he appears to be wearing a very similar outfit to that of the eerie doll. The caption released with the image unnervingly states, " He's made a friend ."

Meanwhile,  two images released a few months later focused on Holmes' character, Liza, the very concerned matriarch of the new family occupying Brahms' dark playground. In one photo, Liza is staring suspiciously at the porcelain doll while holding a TV remote in her hand. Is Brahms attempting to control the family TV from behind the walls? In another, Liza is holding a flashlight in the face of the porcelain doll while looking concerned about something beyond the frame. If he's up to his old tricks, then you can bet that Brahms is still projecting the same troubling noises throughout the house, which is plenty of cause for concern for any family in a new home

Brahms' new friend

Rising star Christopher Convery (who you might remember as depicting a young Billy from Stranger Things in those season three flashbacks) is playing Jude, the son of the family who becomes Brahms' new buddy. In an exclusive image shared by USA Today , Jude can be seen sitting on the couch next to the doll, both of them dressed in identical grey suits. It's difficult to imagine Jude's parents joyfully getting a local tailor to fashion a tiny suit for the kid so that he can match his new favorite doll, so instead, it could be possible that Brahms has left an old childhood suit out for Jude to wear. 

Considering the history of Brahms — who had his childhood taken away from him when his parents forced him to live in the walls of the Heelshire Mansion — it's easy to theorize that Jude could be getting used as a vehicle for Brahms to reclaim the childhood he lost. Or if the Heelshires are somehow still lurking about, it possible that they simply want the young boy to replace the son they hid behind the walls over 20 years ago. Either way, Brahms definitely has a new BFF, so good for him. 

Brahms: The Boy II has a stellar supporting cast

Rounding out the primary cast are Ralph Ineson as Joseph and Owain Yeoman as Liza's husband, Sean. While Yeoman is known best for his roles in films like The Belko Experiment and shows like Emergence and The Mentalist , Ineson will be hugely familiar to genre fans for playing grizzled, hard-worn characters in things like Game of Thrones  and  Ready Player One . Plus, there's his memorable performance in Robert Eggers' practically flawless movie   The Witch . 

Brahms: The Boy II  is an intriguing next step for both of the UK actors who've seen their careers continue to rise and develop over the past few years. While Welsh-native Yeoman appears to be making more of the transition from TV work to cinema, the Yorkshire-born Ineson has been taking massive strides into the mainstream of late, becoming a versatile and beloved genre staple of the small and big screen and in projects of both colossal and tiny budgets.

Brahms: The Boy II has an all-new composer

Bear McCreary provided a startling, eerie classical piano score for the original movie, giving  The Boy a distinctly vintage, haunting feel. For the sequel, however, a new composer is stepping up for the job in the form of Brett Detar (formerly of rock band the Juliana Theory). The musician has previously collaborated with William Brent Bell by composing the nerve-grating score for the director's 2012 possession flick,  The Devil Inside . While he's certainly proved himself to be up to the task of serving up some atmospheric music to score Brahms: The Boy II , it's definitely interesting that Bell has opted to go for a new composer rather than re-use the music and theme of the first film. As a solo artist, Detar's music is primarily folk influenced, which could impact on the final feel of his score. It could also indicate that Brahms: The Boy II  could have a slightly different vibe and atmosphere than the first film.

The film has been repeatedly delayed

First, Brahms: The Boy II  was all set for a blockbuster summer release, with a release date tentatively set for July 2019. Then the film was pushed to a December release, until it was pushed for a third time to February 2020. No official reason has been given as to why these delays were necessary by anybody involved with the film. However, several publications have speculated that Brahms: The Boy II  was removed from the summer release slate to avoid being compared to other spooky doll films like Child's Play and Annabelle Comes Home , which would've been released around the same time. 

As the International Business Times suggested, the film's original release date could have also given Brahms: The Boy II  "lingering competition" from horror movies such as Crawl , 47 Meters Down: Uncaged , and Ready or Not . Now scheduled for February 21st, 2020, the film's new release slot will instead pitch Brahms: The Boy II  up against Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn) , Sonic the Hedgehog , and the Vin Diesel vehicle Bloodshot,  giving it more of an opportunity to grab those horror fan dollars upon release. 

‘Brahms: The Boy II’ Film Review: A Horror Sequel So Bad, It Drags Down Its Predecessor

All hail Katie Holmes for her efforts to infuse this non-scary nonsense with nuance and depth

It’s a hard to believe that several millennia after the invention of the written word, there are still some sentences that have never been put in print. Case in point: “Brahms: The Boy II” is the “Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker” of horror.

Those are words that were probably not designed to go together, and yet here we are, in the year 2020, and the comparison seems weirdly apt. Much like the latest “Star Wars,” William Brent Bell’s sequel to his unexpectedly successful — and genuinely scary — 2016 horror-thriller seems determined to undermine all smart storytelling of the film that preceded it, to the detriment of both.

“Brahms: The Boy II” takes the best elements from “The Boy” and reverses course so abruptly, it practically leaves skidmarks on the screen. It’s not just a subpar sequel; it retroactively injures an otherwise superior film.

The original “The Boy” starred Lauren Cohan as a nanny hired, to her eerie surprise, to take care of a porcelain doll all alone in a giant, gloomy mansion. Over the course of the film, she became convinced that the doll, named “Brahms,” was really alive. The film took its time and actually convinced the audience, subtly and disturbingly, that Brahms was more than he appeared, without ever showing the doll do anything specifically supernatural.

The cleverest part of “The Boy” was that all the familiar, creepy doll horror movie clichés were — Spoiler Alert, but “The Boy II” assumes you already know it from the start — nothing but a red herring. The doll was never alive, it was just a representation of the real person our hero was babysitting: a homicidal maniac who was living inside the walls of the house the whole time.

The sequel takes that intelligent and startling story and kicks it to the curb, telling instead a new tale about how no, really, that doll was supernatural all along. It’s clear from very early into “Brahms: The Boy II” that the porcelain idol is moving on its own, right in front of the camera, rendering the concept of plausible deniability completely moot. The suspense is dead, the cleverness has vanished, and the genre-bending ingenuity of the original is completely subverted.

“Brahms: The Boy II” stars Katie Holmes as Liza, whose idyllic home life was shattered during a shocking and random home invasion, which her son Jude (Christopher Convery, “The Girl in the Spider’s Web”) tragically witnessed. Months later, Liza is suffering from nightmares, and Jude hasn’t spoken a word since the incident, so along with Disbelieving Husband #1,923 — a.k.a. Sean (Owain Yeoman, “The Belko Experiment”) — they move to the countryside, into the guest house behind the mansion from the original film.

It only takes a few minutes for Jude to discover Brahms, buried in the woods, and declare (via a notebook) that they’re taking him home. Liza and Sean are creeped out by the creepy doll because creepy dolls are creepy, but they quickly convince themselves that Brahms is a coping mechanism for Jude which could lead him back to mental health. Never mind that Brahms moves on his own, or that their son is starting to dress like him, or that Jude’s notebook is now full of scary drawings of his parents lying dead in their beds.

Except, of course, that Liza minds very much. “Brahms: The Boy II” is ostensibly about coping with trauma, and watching the people you care about cope with trauma. Liza wants Jude to get better, but she’s also impatient with the whole Brahms scenario. It doesn’t help that her own post-traumatic stress is being treated entirely via self-help books, which don’t seem to be (self-)helping. Sean disbelieves Liza’s suspicions that Brahms is a creepy doll just as much as Liza disbelieves Jude, and they all have a valuable lesson to learn about validating each other’s feelings and listening without letting preconceived notions mar their judgment.

But whereas a film like “Hereditary” dug deep into the psychological quagmire of a family reeling from tragedy, “Brahms: The Boy II” can’t even make a strained dinner table argument about a supernatural doll seem stressful. Moving the action to the guest house doesn’t help — the gothic atmosphere of the original amplified the scares; the hotel-room atmosphere of the vacation home makes them all banal — but the screenplay by Stacey Menear (who also wrote the original) doesn’t seem eager to dig deep into how pained everybody is and how they’re contributing to each other’s anxieties and unhappiness.

So a celebration really is in order for Katie Holmes, who infuses her role in “The Boy II” with all the nuance and depth any actor could muster. She’s so adept at staring skeptically off-camera that she should have her own detective series. Holmes finds the reality within a formulaic and humdrum horror-thriller and gives a performance that belongs in a superior film. The only time she even remotely breaks character is during the movie’s wonky climax, where if you look very carefully, you might catch the surreptitious smirk of an actor who is thrilled to be done with this.

It’s easy to nitpick “Brahms: The Boy II” because, for a lot of the movie, there’s not much else to do. Director Bell tips the movie’s hand so soon, revealing that Brahms really is supernatural practically right away, that most of the running time is spent waiting for the protagonists to catch up. So the only entertainment value we get is chuckling at ridiculous historical montages full of unconvincing Photoshop, or incredulous lines like, “So you’re saying he ripped pages out of his book?!” which imply that nobody has ever removed pages from a notepad before in the entire history of human civilization.

All of this would be forgiven if “Brahms: The Boy II” was fun, or scary, or interesting. You can probably predict where the rest of this paragraph is going. The film has no suspense, wit or shock value. It’s too ploddingly paced to elicit a proper jump scare, and it’s nowhere near insightful enough to get under the skin. The only thing interesting about this disappointing follow-up is how it takes the original film down with it, retroactively hurting the chances of “The Boy” becoming a beloved cult classic.

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He's made a friend.

After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms.

William Brent Bell

Stacey Menear

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Katie Holmes

Christopher Convery

Owain Yeoman

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A review by Gimly

Written by gimly on july 26, 2020.

I know The Boy is not well-liked, but I honestly kind of enjoyed it. Let me clear, I didn't love it. I didn't think it was great . But there was some stuff I liked, and overall I thought that people were maybe a little too harsh on it. Well Brahms ruins everything about The Boy that I felt was worth defending. I had about three nice things that I thought could be said of The Boy , and Brahms not only doesn't have those same things (Remember me saying that the first one has a cast capable of pulling off the premise? Well this one sure doesn't) but also actively works to undo the... read the rest.

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Film review: brahms: the boy ii (2020).

Dan Kappa 05/21/2020 Film Reviews

After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms.

Right off the bat I am presuming you watched this film’s predecessor, The Boy. I will be spoiling said film and this sequel somewhat as it is kinda required to properly review Brahms: The Boy II. You have been warned.

Just to recap on the first film, The Boy was about a wealthy old couple who would treat a creepy doll as their son, Brahms who died at a young age. There were specific rules that had to be followed to keep the Brahms happy or else “odd” (AKA: boring) things would happen. The twist: You thought the doll was possessed, a la Annabelle , but the real Brahms boy survived, the parents kept him in the walls of the house and he would live vicariously through the doll. Kinda like how those awful mums live vicariously through their young beauty pageant slaves– I mean, daughters…

If I had to rate The Boy, I’d give it a 1 out of 5. The pacing was really slow, the characters were boring and the scares were minimal and cliche… so cliche. Blumhouse has already milked this genre cow to empty, drove over it with a roller, ground the flattened bovine remains to a powder, reconstituted it with the tears of children and milked it again, creating the cliche, boring shell of a genre we have today. The Boy brought nothing new to the table (how could it?) but the twist was interesting enough to give it a 1 star from me.

You couldn’t create a sequel to The Boy without flipping it on its head. We knew the twist, how uneventful would have the sequel been if we already knew it was a dude in the walls? Should Brahms: The Boy II had even been made then, you ask? A lot of the cool kid reviewers think not, but my argument is thus; Blumhouse spews out sequels and prequels with the bloodlust of a hot summer sun as a family of gingers venture outside and Blumhouse doesn’t even try to flip the script. Stacey Menear, the writer of this film and its predecessor, tried.

For better or worse, she tried and in my opinion, kind of succeeded. By no means am I saying it’s a good film, don’t mistake me here, but Stacey even tied it enough to the original film to make it somewhat logical. There are holes and questionable elements, granted, but by giving the sequel a supernatural twist, the creepiness was increased because now the doll moves ! Okay, it moves minimally, but that’s a lot more than the first movie. In The Boy, Doll Brahams sat around like a 50s era male waiting for his wife to take care of everything and bring him a beer.

Admittedly, by making Brahms: The Boy II supernatural, you can’t help but compare it to Annabelle the reconstituted cow (say that 10 times fast), but it had some neat bits which made it mildly entertaining and kind of stand on its own. Firstly, the son (played well by Christopher Convery) of the new family doesn’t speak due to a previous trauma. He communicates via a notepad and this allows Doll Brahms to enter the family as emotional support object. Though the doll is creeping the parents out, it’s helping their son so they let him keep it. The mother (Katie Holmes) also suffers from trauma and has nasty dreams because of it. When Doll Brahms starts to “play”, her trauma induces confusion and conflict to her and the family. Is what she sees real, or just a figment of her traumatised imagination?

Without spoiling the film further, you can see there’s some building blocks to the script which could have meant for great conflict, creepiness and scares, and though the creepiness and scares are infinitely better than its predecessor, Brahms: The Boy II is unfortunately still average in this department. It plays too safe so you are never on the edge of your seat. To its credit though, it doesn’t over-utilise jump scares at all, a crutch I absolutely loathe and think is the lowest form of horror… The Blumhouse Juggernaut has no shame in doing it, ad Blumhouseam, of course.

Ultimately, Brahms: The Boy II is a tame affair that offers nothing new to the genre and just teeters on the precipice of creepiness without ever tipping over.

3 out of 5 dolls

Tags 2020 Brahms Brahms: The Boy II Christopher Convery Daphne Hoskins Katie Holmes Keoni Rebeiro Owain Yeoman

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BRAHMS: THE BOY II

"schizophrenic ending to a schizophrenic concept".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: A character eventually reveals he has some ulterior motives, an older boy bullies a younger boy, the younger boy has psychological problems because of the trauma he suffered when masked robbers invaded his home and knocked his mother unconscious, and the younger boy at one point tells his parents his creepy doll will murder them if they don’t obey the doll.

More Detail:

BRAHMS: THE BOY II takes the creepy doll from the original 2016 horror movie and fashions a story where the doll haunts a young married couple and their little boy when the family movies into the guest house near the spooky mansion from the first movie. In BRAHMS, it’s like the twist ending to the first movie never happened. Now, unlike the last movie, the doll is really and truly possessed by some kind of evil spirit that can also possess the young couple’s son. Can the parents save their son from the doll’s evil spirit?

Despite its apparent occult worldview, BRAHMS: THE BOY II never gives a final supernatural or theological explanation for the abilities of the creepy doll, which can move its head and eyes, overturn a large table and perhaps even kill. The movie implies that the evil spirit animating the doll can somehow create a dual, schizophrenic personality in the married couple’s son. Also, a short epilogue reveals that the doll’s evil spirit has somehow survived, despite the doll’s physical destruction in a previous scene. Thus, although the parents think they’ve defeated and destroyed the doll and its evil spirit, they really haven’t.

The story in BRAHMS: THE BOY II is ultimately depressing and unsatisfying. Although a couple scenes hint that the son’s mother may be imagining things, that doesn’t seem to be the case at the end. BRAHMS: THE BOY II is abhorrent, because the evil spirit wins in the very end. Perhaps another sequel, however, will carry the story forward and explain the origins of the evil spirit and how it can be destroyed.

Movie Review: “BRAHMS: THE BOY II” plays flat notes

Thursday, February 20, 2020 | Review

By MICHAEL GINGOLD

Starring Katie Holmes, Owain Yeoman and Christopher Convery Directed by William Brent Bell Written by Stacey Menear STXfilms

Though it was something of a sleeper hit four years ago, THE BOY wasn’t exactly crying out for a sequel. Once its big final-act revelation was sprung, there wasn’t anywhere left for the story to go, which means that BRAHMS: THE BOY II has to become the movie its predecessor was pretending to be for most of its running time.

You may recall (if you don’t and want to avoid spoilers for the original BOY, you can skip this paragraph) that the doll named Brahms appeared to be alive and haunting the characters for a while. Then it turned out that his thought-dead human namesake had actually been dwelling within the walls of Heelshire Manor for years, and manipulating the little porcelain figure. But in order for the second film to happen, Brahms is now possessed of supernatural qualities after all, and still hanging around that eerie old mansion in the British countryside, though it’s now called Glenview Estate and most of the action takes place in a nearby guest house, which means the Gothic atmosphere that gave the first BOY a few creeps is largely lacking in the sequel.

BRAHMS: THE BOY II opens in a suburban London home where preteen Jude (Christopher Convery) sleeps in a room decorated in Tim Burton/Charles Addams style and likes to play scary pranks on his mom Liza (Katie Holmes). But he doesn’t know what true terror is until he witnesses Liza being attacked by a couple of home invaders, an experience that renders him mute. Liza is having trouble recovering as well, so she and husband Sean (Owain Yeoman) take Jude to stay at the Glenview house. The place comes complete with a groundskeeper (gravely-voiced Ralph Ineson from THE WITCH) who glowers and constantly carries a broken-open shotgun, but otherwise seems like a decent guy. And when Jude unearths Brahms from the front lawn, the doll at first seems like it might have therapeutic properties for the troubled boy.

However…but then, you can probably fill in the rest of the story from here. Director William Brent Bell and screenwriter Stacey Menear, both encoring from the original film, haven’t come up with any but the most obvious developments (Brahms begins to take hold of Jude, who develops an attitude and fills a sketchbook with menacing words and pictures, etc.), peppered with jump scares and nightmare scenes, including a nightmare-within-a-nightmare bit. It’s all too tame (this is barely PG-13 stuff) and generic for hardcore horror fans, and—well, too tame and generic for anyone else, either. Even when a group of relatives pay a visit in order for one of them to provide fodder for Brahms’ wrath, that person is so exaggeratedly horrible that there’s neither any surprise nor sympathy when they meet their fate, and the “accident” they suffer is telegraphed well in advance.

This is one of a few crucial moments where any reasonable parents would grab their kid and put the house and Brahms in their rearview mirror, but no one would accuse Liza and Sean of having much common sense. Liza does become suspicious enough to look into Brahms’ background, which opens a couple of plausibility holes, as the filmmakers flirt with but don’t commit to a scenario in which Liza and others begin to doubt her sanity. They also give Jude a complete and unexplained reversal of character around the two-thirds mark and don’t provide Sean a chance to be anything but a sounding board for Liza, all apparently because they’re in a hurry to get to their climax.

It’s only 70 minutes into the movie when that sequence begins, and it ends exactly as you expect it will from its first shot. Then, the very last scene is exactly what you’d expect as well. In fact, the only time BRAHMS: THE BOY II inspires any serious thought is during the end credits, which reveal that one of the production’s chefs was named Tom Cruise, leading one to wonder if he was the one who cooked for Holmes.

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