I had to think long and hard about whether or not to recommend Brightburn. The film has flaws and features characters so incessantly stupid that it’s hard to connect with anyone. The characters say and do things that ordinary people wouldn’t, and it takes a strong sense of disbelief that they wouldn’t be smarter when faced with the situation at hand. On this end of the spectrum, Brightburn is a rather frustrating motion picture.
Despite Brightburn‘s apparent flaws, there is a premise so intriguing that it holds your interest. The film asks the question of what if a Superman type entity came to Earth and instead of providing us with a symbol of hope, he was actually intended to “Take The World” and lead to our destruction. If this is its tantalizing question and an exciting blend of comic book origin story wrapped in a horror film that ultimately has made me decide that Brightburn is worth some of your attention. The film is far from perfect, but I have to respect screenwriters Mark and Brian Gunn (brother’s of James Gunn) for exploring some exciting ideas within the material. The deeper meaning in their screenplay allowed me to ignore some of the clunkiness of their character development and made me curious about the potential universe building as the film began rolling the credits.
The Superman comparison seems fitting, considering how the film begins. A couple that has been struggling to conceive find a parentless child that has crash landed near their barn. This seems like a miracle for Tori Breyer (Elizabeth Banks) and her husband Kyle (David Denman). The universe has denied them having their own child and now it has literally dropped one in their laps. The couple and their new found son live a seemingly happy life until Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) turns 12. Puberty seems to trigger something dark in him, and he begins to lose impulse control. Brandon also discovers his superpowers of invulnerability and fantastic strength and becomes very self-aware that he’s unique and superior to those around him. What happens if that superiority and power go unchecked are at the heart of Brightburn, and it mostly leads to a mounting body count.
The blending of the comic book origin story and pure horror work well in Brightburn‘s favor. There is something inherently frightening about someone coming here with extraordinary abilities and then using them to enact acts of grotesque violence. The concept becomes even more compelling when it’s told through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy. If you’re the victim of being bullied, would you use your abilities to take revenge? I’m not sure if the screenwriters thought too deep into this, but it almost reflects the real-life violence of kids who are driven to bring guns to school to show how they’re now the ones in the power position when they are, in their eyes, pushed too far. In the case of Brightburn, super strength and laser beams that shoot from the eyes replace guns, but the same idea is still there. The film gets a lot of mileage out of a concept that makes us wonder, what if?
Director David Yarovesky also crafts moments of genuine tension and makes the most out of his $6 million budget. Brandon, in his simplistic comic book villain disguise, is framed in such a way during certain scenes that he’s genuinely creepy and the director doesn’t shy away from graphic depictions of gore and violence. The murders in Brightburn aren’t strictly by the numbers. They are crafted in such a gruesome display of over the top violence that made 80s slasher films so much fun for moviegoers. On the one hand, gore-fiends will appreciate it for its no holds barred approach which could lead to its cult status one day and on the other hand, the extreme brutality also goes a long way to display Brandon’s lack of control. I found that the gore served the story and how unhinged Brandon was becoming as his powers developed.
For all the good of the premise, the characters are mostly a letdown. Brandon proves to be the most, and Jackson A. Dunn is primarily successful in the role. At times he seems a tad out of his depth, but then there are moments when he displays creepy indifference that is genuinely unsettling. Oddly enough, Dunn briefly played a good guy in the biggest superhero film of the summer (He was a young Scott Lang in Avengers: Endgame when they first test sending Ant-Man through time).
The veteran members of the cast, Elizabeth Banks and David Denman, are frequently let down by the more stupid aspects of the script. There are moments when they don’t feel like real people because their reaction to the events doesn’t feel grounded in reality. It’s the one horror trope I wish this film didn’t adapt. Horror movies have become known for having characters do stupid things in order to advance the plot, but the level of obliviousness exhibited by pretty much everyone is ridiculous. You can forgive this level of stupidity in genre efforts that border on camp but Brightburn clearly has loftier goals and it distracts from the more ambitious aspects of its story.
Is it possible to appreciate flawed but intriguing concepts? In the case of Brightburn, it is. The film, with its shades of Superman, The Omen and Chronicle for good measure, is not exciting and it’s consistently entertaining, but you wish the character development could match the intriguing premise on display. The film is a tad open-ended, and even though I was frustrated by its shortcomings, I was still interested enough to explore this world further, and that’s a credit to the writers on some level, even if they didn’t quite stick the landing.
