Film Review: Brightburn (2019)

Originally, Superman was conceived as a villain and a threat to humanity. Some comics (like Injustice) and some films (like Zack Snyder’s films) still emphasize the terror of an evil Superman, but in most stories, he remains good thanks to a combination of nature or nurture. But if it wasn’t for either, he could have turned into a sinister, nihilistic destroyer.

In the town of Brightburn, a familiar story unfolds: a couple in the country happen across an alien spacecraft with a baby boy inside, and they raise him as their own. And just like Superman, the boy discovers that he has superhuman strength, invulnerability, super-speed, flight, and laser-eyes. But instead of using these powers for good, the kid uses it to take revenge on bullies, throw tantrums that break rooms, spy and torment the helpless, throw cars around, murder people he doesn’t like, and…it only gets worse from there.

Brightburn has the distinction of being a horror film that uses superpowers as the source of fear. Given the slow-burning way it tracks Brandon’s arc (portrayed quite well by Jackson A. Dunn), there’s potential in exploring the horrific implications of an anti-Superman. The pieces are all there, blatantly lifted from the Kent household but updated for modern times (thanks largely to the more realistic tension that Elizabeth Banks and David Denman bring to the table). Conceptually, the film should be a cohesive marriage of comic book tropes and macabre horror, wrapped around a simple fall arc.

Unfortunately, I feel as though something didn’t gel right, and I suspect it’s because the film falls back on conventional horror tropes and structure rather than comic-book lore. Watching it as a horror film, it feels right at home with films like The Prodigy or even The Omen. If you swapped out Brandon’s inhuman powers with mere demonic possession, the film would still work, precisely because it’s a smaller-scale, atmospheric slow-burner with emphasis on jump-scares, uncanny phenomenon, and a few gory kills. Making the kid fly and zoom around as a threat adds surprisingly little to the outcome. As a comic-book deconstruction, I’m certain the film wants us to pause and think about how horrifying it is to have a troubled kid with all this power destroying cities and taking lives, but this never approaches the level of stakes or dramatic weight that a film like Chronicle achieves (and Chronicle also excelled at organically growing a horrifying, compelling villain out of Dane DeHaan’s character—that guy still gives me the chills). Even Man of Steel elicits more fear out of its Kryptonian villains—Brightburn might have actually benefited from that sort of disaster porn. We get some glimpses of it towards the end, but it amounts to nothing more than a downer ending (not much different than how Cabin in the Woods ended).

Really, I see it as a failure to merge the genres effectively. In its effort to emphasize horror, the film ditches aspects of its original inspirations (that of the superhero genre), and in doing so the point falls rather flat. And it’s a shame because the film generally looks good, performances aren’t too shabby, and the sets, props, costumes, and locales look solid. There are moments of genuine terror, thanks to select scenes where the characters uncover some of Brandon’s disturbing behavior. It also shows that effort was put into the script to lay a fair amount of groundwork to make the story work. But it’s a tall order to find sympathy for a kid that’s purposefully characterized as an inhuman predator, and ultimately becomes an alien threat. There are too many moments where all these characters become unlikable, and it’s hard to care for what happens to them when they make dumb or cliched decisions. If you see where this is all going, you’ll know that they all die anyway, leaving nobody to really root for.

Brightburn is a little frustrating, seeing as it wants to explore a compelling antithesis on superhero lore, but doesn’t really say anything profound other than “it’s scary!” And it does so by being a normal (if not cliched) slasher movie. This could have been so much more if more effort was put into refining the characters and their directions (as it was in Chronicle), and in fleshing out certain ideas (this is about an alien boy, so why not play up the cosmic horror some more? Come on people, it’s only been a year since Annihilation and Mandy came out, the fear of the otherworldly is totally in now). If it wasn’t for all the missed opportunities, this film could have burned brighter.

3/5