Movie Review: 'Brightburn' Fails to Fire Up Scares

Brightburn ruined my day. I was in a good mood before I saw this nasty, brutal, B-movie. What if Superman were evil, and Ma and Pa Kent were morons; that's the premise of Brightburn. Take the paragon of virtue, Superman, and make him a figure of ugly malevolence. Subversion is a perfectly suitable goal, but you’d better have a good point to said subversion, be it merely an interesting thinkpiece or an alt-world comic book. Unfortunately, all Brightburn has is a premise, and a taste for blood.

Brightburn stars Elizabeth Banks and David Denman as Tori and Kyle Breyer. Tori and Kyle are struggling to have a baby. Then one night a meteor crashes in their backyard. Cut to opening credits as we watch Tori and Kyle suddenly playing with a baby. The somewhat clumsy, but good enough, visual indication is that the baby came from inside whatever crashed in the backyard, and we are off to the races with the Superman allusions.

Jumping ahead to the future, the baby, Brandon (Jackson A Dunn), is now 12 years old, and in this pivotal moment, he begins to change. If the metaphor isn’t slapping you around with its lack of subtlety, it’s like puberty, but with Superman. At least mom and dad assume Brandon’s weird behavior is due to puberty. What they don’t know is that Brandon has begun hearing voices, and the visual cues we get are that the voices are coming from the spaceship his parents are hiding in the barn. The voices, speaking some kind of alien Latin, tell Brandon to take the world.

The parents assume Brandon’s behavior is merely due to hormones and puberty, even after their son eats a fork. They take him on a camping trip and Dad has ‘the talk’ with him, but leaves out the part wherein when you have feelings for a girl, you should only act if she feels the same. This leads to a horrifically poorly thought out scene where it appears a 12 year old boy is about to rape a 12 year old girl. The scene achieves the dread the filmmakers intended, but it damn sure never feels necessary.

Nothing much about Brightburn feels essential. The film plays far too much like a premise that the filmmakers haven’t given enough thought to. For instance, another scene between the villainous child Superman analog touches upon the horrors of school violence in rather subliminal terms. Brandon states something along the idea of making people understand why he does what he does, and the creepy presentation brings to mind the dialogue of creeps who go on to commit horrific violence based on their perceived rejection by society.

Unfortunately, Brightburn is not a film with the weight or substance to bear such weighty intimations, and because of that, the film comes off as glib, little more than a cash in on the elevator pitch of "What if Superman were evil?" The back slapping, "aren’t we clever," vibe extends to the gory violence, which takes the film into the horror movie realm in violence alone, the movie is incapable of engaging any of the ideas it raises.

Take for instance the "what would you do if you knew your child were evil" idea. Director Lynn Ramsey directed a far better and more honest version of that premise in We Need to Talk About Kevin, a film also more genuinely frightening than Brightburn. Now, Brightburn was never made with the intent that Kevin was, but Brightburn does awkwardly attempt to use that same idea, and comes up well short. Brightburn wants to claim the depth of Kevin, but without having to actually engage the same ideas.

Why didn’t the parents of Brandon spend any time talking to their son about empathy, compassion, and caring about the feelings of others? The script gives them ample opportunity to reason with the boy, and the first instinct is always to be afraid or defensive of him. Is it because that would undermine the weak script that already can’t handle larger issues? Whatever the reason, it goes further toward my point that the filmmakers were only interested in what was going to get them to the next bit of gore.

On top of a weak script, Brightburn is also not a fun movie to look at. Early on, the directors use a handheld style that is completely not necessary. Handheld camera has its place and purpose, but when a character is directly in front of the camera, and the intent is not to place another character perspective behind that character, then it just feels like the directors forgot to steady the camera, rather than using the camera to enhance or enrich the perspective of the scene.

The score of Brightburn is also overly pushy and insistent. I kept getting pushed out of the movie thinking about how much more interesting individual scenes might be if the score weren’t poking me in the ribs, and directing me to be afraid. Even before Brandon’s evil begins to present itself, the score is insisting we feel dread and fear. Rather than have the characters and situation dictate how we feel, the score keeps insisting upon our feelings, and it bugged me to no end.

Brightburn is all premise no movie. Evil Superman is what they want, and evil Superman is what the filmmakers deliver, but they don’t have anything deeper or more meaningful to say. The filmmakers don’t appear to care about the implications of that premise, it’s simply a means to get to gory set pieces with a guy’s jaw getting knocked off, or a lady getting a shard of glass in her eye. I will admit, the bloody perspective shot as the lady tries to see around the wound in her eye is appropriately gut-wrenching, but Brightburn isn’t cool enough, or scary enough for that to be enough. One clever visual can’t justify all of the wasted opportunities of Brightburn; the chances the filmmakers don’t take in favor of the easier route of blood and guts.