My Review of Brightburn (2019)

 

Written by Brian Gunn And Mark Gunn

Directed by David Yarovesky

Brandon: "Take the world!"

You know how there's this growing discourse among comic book Twitter fans in terms of Evil Superman? In the sense that it's something a lot of us feel has been played out? Well, in 2025, a certain director will be giving us Superman: Legacy but back in 2019, he was somewhat in the concept of an Evil Superkid, with this horror outing.

It started so innocent. A couple in Kansas find an abandoned spaceship in a field. In the spaceship was a baby boy. The couple in question - Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman) Breyer take the baby in and raise him as their son. For twelve years everything was fine. Then it wasn't as the baby grew into a boy named Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) and the latter began to suspect that he wasn't like other children.

Turning twelve meant that Brandon took an interest in a girl named Caitlyn (Emmie Hunter) who went from complimenting Brandon on his intellect to being very much afraid of him as he began to stalk her. On top of that, Brandon also broke her arm during a test exercise at school and would later kill her mother, Erika (Becky Wahlstrom) and the latter wouldn't be the only person that Brandon would kill as this movie progressed.

The moment that Brandon was told about his true origins and when he realised what the voices in his head were really telling him, any hope that his beleaguered parents had of retaining control of him went out the window. Brandon didn't even waste time threatening his aunt and school counselor, Merilee (Meredith Hagner) before killing her husband, Noah (Matt Jones) in a rather gruesome way.

With both of those deaths, it became apparent to both Tori and Kyle that their adopted son was a monster in the making and Kyle's attempts to take out Brandon spectacularly backfired big time. Seeing Brandon using a certain ability that a certain Kryptonian uses quite often on his father really did highlight that the kid was an absolute lost cause.

Even Tori came to the grave realisation that her adopted son was too dangerous for her to control and attempting to get the local sheriff (Gregory Alan Williams) to help ultimately did nothing to stop the absolute carnage that Brandon wrecked on everyone. Let's just say that this movie doesn't end on the most positive of note as Brandon full embraced his destiny. 

- The movie was named after the Smallville substitute town it took place in. The Breyers house looked similar enough to the Kents as well.

- Michael Rooker popped up as a conspiracy theorist YouTuber while Jennifer Holland, Steve Agee and Stephen Blackehart had minor roles. There was also a link to James Gunn's other movie, Super.

- Standout music: Billie Eilish's Bad Guy was used pretty well during the closing credits.

- Chronology: It began in 2006 and moved into 2018 for the rest of the movie.

Brighburn shamelessly took the Evil Superman/kid idea and certainly utilised it well enough, in spite of both it's short running time and smaller budget. James Gunn returned to his horror roots with this one and his brothers penned a solid script with decent direction by Yarovesky. It's not perfect but it's well executed for it's concept.

Rating: 7 out of 10