Brightburn review: Horror can’t follow through on its flashy premise

Its twisted take on Superman’s origin story dabbles in our modern obsession with superheroes, but all we get are stray thoughts instead of a fully formed idea

Dir: David Yarovesky. Starring: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A Dunn, Matt Jones, Meredith Hagner. Cert 15, 90 mins

Imagine Superman, but he’s evil. It’s the kind of aggressively simple pitch that immediately makes a room full of executives drool, knowing the thing can pretty much market itself. Add to that the backing of a high-profile director (Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn, who acts as producer) and just a touch of nepotism (the script’s written by his brother, Brian Gunn, and his cousin, Mark Gunn), and you’ve got the kind of project Hollywood always stumbles over itself to make.

Unfortunately, Brightburn, directed by David Yarovesky, can’t follow through on its flashy premise. We’re surrounded by familiar settings: the film opens on a small Kansas town, the titular Brightburn, and a married couple, Tori and Kyle Breyer, played by Elizabeth Banks and David Denman, who have spent years trying to conceive. One night, a blessing arrives from the skies: an alien spacecraft crash-lands in the nearby woods, with its sole passenger a baby boy, who in every way seems human to them. But the child (Jackson A Dunn), whom they name Brandon, starts to manifest powers as soon as puberty hits, and the couple discover how different he truly is. So far, so Clark Kent. Yet, the twist Brightburn provides is this: what if, instead of seeing himself as humanity’s protector, Clark saw himself as humanity’s superior? What if he came to view his earthly hosts as worthy of subjugation?

And so, we see many of the classic notes of Superman’s origin story in a twisted, new light: Brandon still levitates cars, blasts his heat vision and soars through the air, but all with horrific results. In a way that echoes James Gunn’s own pre-Guardians sensibility, specifically in the 2006 horror comedy Slither, Brightburn goes hard on its moments of gore, most memorably in a scene where a shard of glass meets a very unlucky eyeball. But the film’s too self-serious to indulge in schlocky, B-movie fun, so those moments are rare. Instead, it’s mostly populated by an endless string of bland jumpscares, where Brandon suddenly pops out of the darkness and the soundtrack blares at full volume. It’s the easiest and least imaginative way to try and scare an audience. Dunn has the right kind of vacant expression to make Brandon an eerie presence in the film, but it’s hard to feel that menaced by a character who finds it necessary to make his eyes go red whenever he’s in evil-boy mode as if he’s a human mood ring.

Despite its simplicity, Brightburn’s premise is filled with potential, but it struggles to find anything meaningful to say. It dabbles in our modern obsessions with superheroes and individual exceptionalism, but all we get are stray thoughts instead of a fully formed idea. Our focus is on the parents and the film wants us invested in the idea that this used to be a picture of familial harmony, as we get slow-motion shots of Tori ruffling her son’s hair. Banks and Denman do a great job with their characters’ increasing sense of exasperation, as they’re unable to differentiate what’s an expected part of puberty and what’s actually the manifestation of evil alien forces. Sure, it’s normal for him to keep pictures of bikini models under his bed, but medical diagrams? There’s a great tragedy to these two people who can’t process the idea that they’ve raised a monster but, again, it’s a nugget of an idea that’s never fully developed.

Also, rather crucially, the film’s investment in Brandon’s parents comes at the sacrifice of understanding Brandon himself at any level. He’s a perfectly behaved boy until, on his 12th birthday, the spaceship he crash-landed in starts glowing and speaking in ominous tongues, demanding he do bad things. Does Brandon have any sense of free will in this? Does he want to become evil or was it simply what he was designed to do? These are all just more ideas that Brightburn hints at without ever offering us something meaty to chew on. It’s a film that never strives for more than the elevator pitch it was conceived as.

Brightburn is out now