Brightburn

Starring: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn

Director: David Yarovesky

Oh Brightburn, Brightburn, Brightburn…what art thou? Some super gory fun with an incredible concept or a super powered mess full of very dumb characters and sloppy execution?

If you know the story of Superman, specifically Zack Snyder’s Superman, then you know the premise of Brightburn. Writers Brian and Mark Gunn take that framework and imagine if superman was an invasive species rather than a symbiotic one. Zack and Tori Beyer (David Denman and Elizabeth Banks) live on a farm in Brightburn in a home big enough for a family, but despite trying they cannot have child. One night, a meteor lands in the woods on the outskirts of their land. It ends up being a pod that gifts them with a baby boy (Jackson A. Dunn), who they name Brandon and raise as their own. He is incredibly smart, but he is weird, a bit alien, and so he becomes the target of bullies and the whole town seems to not really like him. He also has a habit of sleepwalking at night into the barn where his ship is locked under the floor and trying to get at it. As Brandon starts to realize what he is and what he can do, his parents have to grapple with his increasingly troubling behavior. If their son is bad, can they turn against him? Or do they stand by him until the end no matter what?

For a few minutes I was a thousand percent on board with this movie. That concept is so good that, done correctly, could be a unique entry that combines horror and superhero movies together while dealing with some intense metaphors about puberty, the loss of childhood, and ignoring clear danger in terms of who we trust and why. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the time or the will to attempt these things with any real conviction.

Brightburn is a movie that wants to be a fun/gory body count movie, a domestic drama, and a bleak superhero origin story amongst many other things. There are moments that work, but they can’t fit together in any meaningful way. We start to dissect Brandon’s feelings of superiority or his adoptive father’s doubts about him and then bam we gotta move on or stop plot lines because at a brief 90 minutes, this pupper has got to MOVE and leave a wake of unfulfilled potential and story behind.

There aren’t many times where I see a movie I didn’t gel with and think, “man I wish they had more time,” but Brightburn is an exception. With an extra twenty or thirty minutes we could have spent some more time making this a lived in world rather than a bullet train firing towards the finish line.

It would also give us more time with our super villain Brandon before anything odd happens. Seeing the trailers I wrongly assumed that they would attempt to make us care for this hyper-intelligent, odd boy who gets bullied because he is different. A young boy who wants to find love but can’t because everyone is weirded out by him. Show me the boy who could potentially be a hero and how his circumstances/genetics force him on a tragically darker path. Instead we get about three full seconds with Brandon before we know he is BAD NEWS. It sucks he is being bullied, but like, everyone should be freaked out. He is dangerous and mean and has glowing red eyes. I didn’t care about Brandon at all.

I really didn’t care about any of the characters except for Elizabeth Banks, but I am a huge fan of hers. She gives this character her all and finds the pathos and the sadness in a mother trying to protect her son. Even that falls apart from being fulfilling at the end, mostly because every character in this film is ridiculously stupid. I am all for horror movie characters being dumb for the sake of getting a body count, but once you start mixing other elements they can’t be quite this dumb.

Brandon is clearly an issue. He is constantly doing creepy things and almost no one cares. Even the ones who do care are sinfully silly. He breaks a young girls hand and chews up a fork with ease. That should send a family to the highest defcon level, but instead he is just being a difficult teen.

While there is some really fantastic, mean spirited horror that I deeply enjoyed, this movie can’t sustain the atmosphere beyond set pieces. Take the difference between a genre master like James Wan and the director of Brightburn, David Yarovesky. While Yarovesky can grab some stunning shots on his budget, he isn’t able to efficiently perform set up and payoff at the level of other horror. In the first Conjuring film, Wan has the family play a game where they try to find each other by clapping. They set it up early and when it comes back it is devastatingly scary. Here there is a similar start; Tori and Brandon play a game where they try to find each other by whistling. It happens in the first five minutes and takes far too long to pay off and even then it’s a whimper not a bang.

One last thing, when Brandon takes a victim in a local diner, he writes his symbol ALL OVER THE MIRRORS. Of course they are gone when the police arrive, but when the detective is looking around he randomly blows on the window to reveal one of the symbols. How could he have seen it? How did he know it was there? Who cares?

Despite everything, this movie gets a C+ from me. Honestly, its ideas are so cool and interesting that this isn’t a complete flop. It is also pretty damn watchable and I never wanted to leave the theater. Plus, it’s got a slam-dunk of an after credits sequence that sets up a connected world I would love to see. I would visit the town of Brightburn again; I just hope the guides learned a little something from their first tour.