Brightburn is a nasty piece of work – which is exactly what it wants to be. This thing’s got a chip on its shoulder and a mean streak a mile long. I have the feeling that this might be a pretty polarizing film. Some viewers might not mesh with the sense of nihilism running throughout. For others, it’s a nice black-hearted surprise. The premise is simple, and presented here with more elegance than in Zack Snyder’s Superman movies: what if someone had all of Superman’s powers and none of his morality? Would that just be an unstoppable villain? Brightburn suggests something worse: an angry, petulant young god.
Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle Breyer (David Denman) are trying for a baby. They have been for a while. They want a child, and who can blame them? They’re both pretty and goofy and crazy about each other. Their latest effort is interrupted by a crash landing in their backyard. From the wreckage Tori pulls a baby, which they adopt as their son. From here on out, it’s the basic Superman story (a Twitter user whose name I can’t recall referred to this movie as We Need to Talk About Kal-El), down to the farmhouse in Kansas. The child, Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn), is your basic milquetoast protagonist. There’s nothing really interesting about Brandon, and at times Dunn’s performance can match that dullness, although, to be fair to Dunn, he perks up when he gets the chance to show more emotional range in Brandon, and the way he is able to deaden his eyes betrays a deep reservoir of feeling. Watch out for this kid.
The performances, across the board, are solid. Denman and Banks have easy, believable chemistry, and Denman especially acquits himself nicely as a man pushed to unthinkable, extreme actions, which have similar consequences. Banks is saddled with a more thankless role – the token unbeliever from most horror movies – but imbues Tori with enough maternal protectiveness that this can be excused. She’s not dismissing Kyle when he says that something is wrong with Brandon; she just loves Brandon so much that it’s become a weakness. Evan Jones (most notably of Breaking Bad) does a nice job livening up his few scenes as Kyle’s brother Noah. The guy plays good uncle.
Things start to go awry when the escape pod, which Kyle and Tori have hidden in the barn, starts glowing red and transmitting messages to Brandon. (Why it waited twelve years to do this is certainly a question worth asking, but this would not be a scary film if it revolved an evil infant.) Soon he finds himself in fugue states, speaking in an alien tongue, gradually deciphering the message. He tries to start the lawn mower and winds up heaving it far across the yard. When he puts his hand in the spinning blade, the blade breaks. On that note, this part didn’t fully work for me, because Brandon too quickly makes the leap between throwing the mower and sticking his hand into it.
Brandon knows he has special abilities and begins using them to selfish, frightening effect. A classmate’s hand is broken, her mother nearly blinded and subsequently abducted. This is ostensibly a horror film, but if it were just that, it wouldn’t be a very good one. The scares are almost all of the jump variety, which is both cheap and easy. Any time lights flicker off, which happens a lot, you know Brandon will be there when they come back on. It’s a trick that has lost its effectiveness, but is still being employed.
So it’s a good thing that I don’t consider Brightburn to be a horror film. Horrific, maybe. The kills in this movie are few but memorable. All but one are brutal affairs that we see all of on camera. This is not a movie for the squeamish; there were a few moments that were genuinely hard to look at. It’s upsetting to see how the human body to attack, and it is not a sight that Brightburn spares the audience. If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if Superman used his laser vision on a human face, or splattered someone with a supersonic tackle, you’re in luck, because Brightburn has some very graphic answers for you. The film seems to delight in seeing what new ways it can upset the audience, which is where that nihilism I spoke of really shines through.
Brightburn doesn’t have many nice things to say about human nature. Brandon is from another planet, sure, but he looks and sounds like us, and the second he learns the truth he develops a superiority complex. There’s an easy comparison to make here between Brandon’s genocidal urges and the rise of fascism and public racism in the age of Trump. That may or may not be what the film is getting at, but I think Brightburn is too hell-bent on discomfiting the audience to care about satire or commentary. I don’t think that Brandon is necessarily a stand-in for any one person or philosophy, but I think his actions speak of a cynical outlook on the part of the writers, Brian and Mark Gunn (their famous brother James is a producer). If Brandon is presented as a human, and coded as one, what does it say about us that his first instinct is towards evil?
Director David Yarovesky is a music video veteran with a decent eye for staging and blocking, but it becomes clear that he’s unused to a longer length. Certain scares get repeated throughout, and it’s disheartening to see Brightburn return to its bag of tricks. Seeing Brandon float menacingly outside of a window is scary, yes – the first time. There’s a case of diminishing returns, which is why this doesn’t totally work as a horror movie for me. But if you want to be horrified, this will do the trick.
If I had to compare Brightburn to another film, it would be Frank Darabont’s The Mist. While Darabont’s film might be overall more successful, Brightburn is playing in that same ballpark, turning over the rocks of human nature and exploring all the nasty critters underneath. It takes guts to make a movie like this, guts I’m sure Brandon would be happy to tear right out.
4/5
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