Day 3 of watching a horror movie every night of October, and I’m coming at you with a movie I was really not expecting to like as much as I did.
Brightburn is a horror movie directed by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy and “making a questionable joke on Twitter that everyone decided they hated 12 years after the fact” fame. The movie tells the Superman-esque story of Brandon Bryer, a child who was found by a home-grown Kansas couple in the woods after his spacecraft crash landed by their farm. He develops into a power-hungry child supervillain that terrorizes his small town. When this movie first came out, I was intrigued yet skeptical of it. After all, I had already seen the alternate universe where Superman is raised by people with no empathy and wreaks destruction on towns and cities; it was called Man of Steel.
But Brightburn actually tells a surprisingly heartbreaking story about a couple who lovingly raise a helpless, mysterious child and watch powerlessly as he becomes something evil and cold. There were three things I loved about Brightburn: 1) the childhood Brandon receives is the childhood we should have gotten in Man of Steel. Instead of Pa Kent saying “I don’t know boy, maybe you should’ve let those kids drown,” and Ma Kent saying “You don’t have to be their hero, Clark, f*** ’em,” we get scenes of a young loving family telling their son how special he is and how much good he can do in the world.
2) Gunn and his cinematographers make wonderful use of the character’s superpowers to create truly terrifying scenes; without spoiling anything, the diner scene should go down as one of the most iconic horror movie sequences of recent history.(Vance Here : This is the only scene I’ve seen from the film but I totally agree with him on this! Alright, carry on.)
3) Rather than making the kid a total psychopath or subjecting him to horrible parenting to make a supervillain, Gunn instead brings in the classic nature vs. nurture debate: Is it our environment, our inherent character, or a mixture of both that decide who we are. At the beginning of the movie, Brandon is just a normal kid with a loving family, but the combination of supernatural and relationship elements awaken something in him to make him into the villain he becomes.
I love Brightburn because if you take the first 15 minutes or so of the movie, you could easily market it as a legitimate Superman origin story. Horror movies have been historically bad at accurately portraying mental illness or psychology, but the psychosocial development that Brandon experiences over the course of the movie is a great portrayal of just how complex a person’s personality and growth can be.
Brightburn also has some great little references and Easter eggs for comic book fans to enjoy. I will say, for a movie that nails its tonal balance throughout the story, I was a bit disappointed in the use of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” as the closing song. It’s a dose of edginess and modernity that I don’t think the movie really needed to end on. All that said, Brightburn was a delightful surprise that both works as a horror movie and serves as a much better “what if” alternate superhero story than the last two Superman movies we got.
