The Boy

A young American in England (Lauren Cohan) hires out as nanny to an elderly couple’s 8-year-old son—only the “son” turns out to be a porcelain doll; the real boy died 20 years ago, and his grieving parents have lived this mad fantasy ever since. The nanny stays on out of pity and her own desperation—then begins to see signs that the doll might not be so inanimate after all. Writer Stacey Menear and director William Brent Bell get things off to a great start, with a genuinely creepy atmosphere, a strong performance by Cohan and a couple of well-placed jump-scares. Then they blow it in the last half-hour; the movie violates its own internal logic and dissolves into worn-out slasher-flick tropes. Too bad; Menear and Bell had a bizarrely good thing going, but they couldn’t come up with an ending. J.L.