Let’s get the basics out of the way first: If you saw the trailers for Brightburn and went, “huh, an Evil Superboy story,” and then went thumbs up or thumbs down on the basic preimse, you made the right call.
Brightburn is well-cast, well-acted, and well put together. But it never really rises above its elevator pitch gimmick.
We get our couple in Kansas desperately wanting a child.
We get them acquiring a kid of alien origins.
We get that kid acting weird and becoming more and more hostile rigth around his twelfth birthday.
We get the kid discovering who and what he is, and using his powers for evil (and let me tell you, this movie doesn’t shy away from the gruesome aspects of superstrong flying laser-eyed hyperspeed being versus normal humanity).
But that’s about it. We don’t really dig into anything else beyond the very basics.
We see an adoptive mother’s love for her son, even as it becomes clearer and clearer that there’s something wrong, and then her resolution to do something about it only when his monstrous nature has become undeniable.
We see some interesting flashes of what this means for the alien himself- he appears to have some genuine interest in certain humans, and his turn toward hostility is externally induced, but it never stops him from doing to them whatever he thinks they deserve, and we spend far more time with him clearly being a menace to the entire human race than in really exploring his psyche. Certainly, he seems to feel zero remorse for any of the things he does- which is good for conveying his inhuman nature, but also cuts off certain avenues.
We see a small town whose inhabitants we never really click with serve more as backdrop than actual setting- we honestly never learn that much about Brightburn Kansas, except that it’s apparently a short drive away from some forests that look an awful lot like Georgia. Nudge, nudge. The townsfolk barely appear- there’s the waitress you see getting pounced on in the trailer, the girl whose hand you see him break in the trailer, the sheriff and one deputy, a couple of generically unfriendly classmates, a couple of dudes at a bar, and the adoptive aunt and uncle of the family unit. While there’s no “20 minutes with jerks” of 1990s slasher film fame, nor do we really get a feel for most of the victims. It’s never presented as if any of them in any way deserve the horrible things done to them, but nor do most of them feel like fully realized human beings, which robs the carnage of some of the horror we should be feeling.
There’s one pretty good bait-and-switch with someone we think is doomed subverted by circumstance, but this is not a film that offers much in the way of surprise, despite the hyperspeed being used for jump scares from time to time.
If you find the basic premise interesting and can stomach some pretty brutal violence and gore, it’s worth a watch… but I doubt it’ll be the sort of film the truly reward a repeat viewing.
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