BRIGHTBURN [Film Review]

This is the worst kind of action-horror film there is: it takes an intriguing idea and does absolutely nothing interesting with it.
Straight out the gate there is zero exposition in terms of setting up the story. Instead the film starts with a meteor crash on a farm and then fast-forwards 12 years. Our protagonist, a young lad named Brandon, is apparently a prodigy who is also an outcast at school (nevermind that we hardly see any scenes of bullying or other instances that would shape his personality). Soon, however, young Brandon is donning a creepy cape and cowl and carrying on in a most viloent manner. Where he gets the idea for the costume is lost on me as we never see him reading comic books, watching superhero movies, or the like. Not to mention that the kid literally becomes evil overnight with no reason other than a creepy glowing spaceship hiding out in the barn.
The violence is ho-hum. The gore sparse. The suspense is lacking. Hell, there isn’t even a single good jump-scare moment lurking within the film’s 91-minute running time. Not to mention that just about everything that happens is utterly predictable.
Add to this a bevy of one-dimensional characters, such as the clueless mother who refuses to believe her son is evil even though everything points to him being so, the “you’re just imagining things” aunt, the generic dad and uncle, and the small town sheriff who knows something is amiss but really doesn’t do anything about it.
In regards to the rest of the story, the entire film exists in a vacuum of vagueness were everything is inferred and the audience is left to assume and then accept what is happening onscreen by filling in the gaps of the plot themselves. My quasi-intellectual self told me that perhaps the film was meant as an allegory for adolescence, but if that’s the case the filmmakers failed miserably.
To top it all off the gratuituously trite and rather lackluster ending leaves things wide open for sequels (here’s hoping that poor Box Office performance will squash that plan, though one cannot discount some streaming service picking it up for an ongoing series).
In the end the whole film feels like an extended elevator pitch for a potentially better film that never got made.

Rating: 1.5/5