Movie Web
This may be the creepiest trailer you'll see all year! STX Entertainment and Lakeshore Entertainment have dropped a first look at The Boy! And it might be too much for some of you to handle. The frightening thrill-ride arrives from director William Brent Bell. Lauren Cohan stars as a nanny who discovers her job isn't all it's cracked up to be. Watch only if you dare!
Brahms: The Boy II seems to want nothing to do with its original, which is an odd and detrimental outcome for your direct continuation of Brahms' ongoing story.
EW
The creepy kid/evil doll genre of horror movie has a long and venerable lineage, perhaps because it’s so easy to project fantasies and insecurities onto Uncanny Valley-straddling plastic figurines. We always want dolls to be more alive than they are, even if that means turning them into Chucky. The Boy, from director William Brent Bell, aims to set itself squarely in the fictional canon of Chucky and its brethren, but it ends up trying to do so much that it forgets to scare us.
I hate dolls. I hate creepy dolls even more. And I can't stand creepy dolls in average movies.
AVClub: The Boy isn’t a terrible movie. It has its moments of tension and (intentional) comic relief, and lead actress Lauren Cohan, best known for her role as Maggie on The Walking Dead, brings a subtle-yet-palpable spark of insanity to an interesting turn her character takes midway through the second act. But these moments of inspiration, or craftsmanship, or whatever you want to call them, are ultimately seasoning sprinkled onto a mushy, microwaved platter of lukewarm horror clichés, a not entirely unexpected outcome from the director of 2013’s similarly derivative The Devil Inside.