Bright­burn

Par­ents can read books and sign up for class­es and do the whole Baby Mozart riga­ma­role, but deep down they’re all scared that they have no real con­trol over how their child will turn out. This fear ani­mat­ed Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, the sto­ry of a woman unsure whether her son suf­fers from gar­den-vari­ety sociopa­thy or has been warped by her sup­pressed resent­ment of him. Either way, her com­plete inabil­i­ty to reach the boy she once held in her arms hor­ri­fies her.

Bright­burn plunges that anx­i­ety into the same reg­is­ter of ter­ror, but while bust­ing through the floor of the art­house into the B‑movie base­ment. As super­hero cin­e­ma approach­es a crit­i­cal mass of homo­gene­ity, direc­tor David Yarovesky and most of the Gunn fam­i­ly (James pro­duces, his broth­er Bri­an and cousin Mark wrote the screen­play, his oth­er broth­er Sean makes a cameo) restore the genre to its low-rent ori­gins with a dark inflec­tion on the Super­man myth recast­ing young Clark Kent as a mini-monster.

The notion of being help­less to stop your off­spring from cur­dling into a vio­lent ver­sion of their for­mer self is fright­en­ing enough; pair cra­ni­um-anni­hi­lat­ing heat vision with the tur­bu­lent mood­i­ness of ear­ly ado­les­cence, and the par­ents don’t stand a chance.

Yarovesky stops short of the camp ter­ri­to­ry of Mervyn LeRoy’s demon-kid clas­sic The Bad Seed, and yet he still main­tains a cer­tain play­ful­ness about the material’s lurid side. An inabil­i­ty to con­ceive mars the oth­er­wise hap­py life of cou­ple Tori and Kyle Brey­er (Eliz­a­beth Banks and David Den­man, respec­tive­ly), until a mys­te­ri­ous ves­sel crash-lands in their heart­land back­yard. One inter­galac­tic adop­tion lat­er, they’re rais­ing a sweet but intense son named Bran­don (Jack­son A Dunn). As teenagers some­times do, he turns malev­o­lent out of nowhere, speak­ing spar­ing­ly and exclu­sive­ly in deli­cious­ly omi­nous mul­ti­ple enten­dres. For every thin­ly-veiled threat there’s a per­fect­ly fore­bod­ing music cue to go with it.

Because the camera’s per­spec­tive sticks chiefly with Tori while keep­ing Bran­don at arm’s length, the ensu­ing bap­tism of evil feels less like a villain’s ori­gin sto­ry and more like a mother’s night­mare com­ing to life. As Bran­don gets his first taste of pow­er and begins dis­patch­ing any­one that gets in his way, Yarovesky and the Gunn brain trust get their jol­lies assem­bling kill tableaux with above-aver­age cre­ativ­i­ty and novelty.

A shard of glass lodges itself in an eye­ball, and we get to watch it dart back and forth as the optic nerve shorts out. One skull dis­in­te­grates, and anoth­er gets cracked in two like a coconut. The super­hero picture’s quin­tes­sen­tial soar­ing-through-the-air sequence takes on a chill­ing new con­text, its Kryp­ton­ian con­no­ta­tion devi­ous­ly perverted.

It’s a sad ref­er­en­dum on the cur­rent state of stu­dio moviemak­ing that a view­er might feel grate­ful when a new release refrains from aggres­sive­ly estab­lish­ing a con­ti­nu­ity prep­ping one or more sequels, but here we are. This film draws its strength in part from its will­ing­ness to be a more humbly scaled oper­a­tion than the tent­poles weight­ed down by man­dates for bil­lion-dol­lar gross­es. It can afford to express a lit­tle more per­son­al­i­ty in terms of tone, going gris­li­er and more self-con­scious­ly sen­sa­tion­al­ist than those peers forced to cater to the aver­age 13-year-old.

In this respect, Bright­burn feels more like a com­ic book than any­thing cranked out of the Mar­vel or DC fac­to­ries in recent years. Between his vacant stare, ice-cold dia­logue deliv­ery, and hand-cro­cheted mask of death, lit­tle Bran­don pos­sess­es a mea­sure of dis­tinc­tion – as of late, a gift increas­ing­ly rare in his ilk – and so does the film that cre­at­ed him. With a potent behav­iour­al basis, it grounds its cen­tral fig­ure even as he rock­ets to a genre stratos­phere of caped cru­saders and slash­ers alike.