Brightburn (2019)
Director: David Yarovesky
Screenwriters: Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn
Starring: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn
Brightburn arrives with a striking premise: what if the familiar Superman origin were twisted into a tale of pure horror? The film hooks you with this idea but ultimately leans far more toward possession and haunted-house conventions than toward a nuanced superhero study. It has strong moments—visceral gore and a memorable climactic beat—but it misses opportunities to deepen its central concept.
Tori and Kyle Breyer discover a crashed spacecraft near their Kansas farm and adopt the infant survivor, naming him Brandon. By middle school Brandon is a brilliant child, and around his twelfth birthday he begins experiencing alien dreams and displaying terrifying powers: invulnerability, super strength, super speed, flight and destructive heat vision. The film frames these developments as a dark mirror of the Superman myth, asking what happens when a being with such abilities is not raised to protect humanity but instead becomes a predator.
The movie sprinkles intriguing clues about Brandon’s origin and species without ever fully committing to an explanation. An early classroom scene references cuckoo wasps—parasites that infiltrate other hives and let their larvae feed on host offspring—hinting at a parasitic or cannibalistic reproductive strategy. The film also suggests that the alien species can transmit knowledge to its spawn, though it’s unclear whether this occurs through technology or some collective telepathic link. These hints are compelling, but Brightburn withholds too much, saving revelations for a final scene that gestures at a larger universe rather than providing satisfying answers within the story itself.
This restraint contributes to one of the film’s central thematic tensions: nature versus nurture. Tori and Kyle genuinely try to raise Brandon well, disciplining him and offering affection, but when he begins to change the family faces an impossible question—are they fighting an innate malignancy or failing to contain it? The script never allows this conflict to evolve into a fully realized moral or psychological study. Brandon is portrayed largely as a blank, emotionless force of cruelty, so the film often asks the audience to accept his actions without the internal complexity that would make his transformation tragic or deeply unsettling.
Structurally, Brightburn is closer to possession horror than superhero drama. It follows familiar beats: unsettling nocturnal behavior, creeping dread, and a series of jump scares that escalate into grisly violence. The film borrows visual and narrative tropes from modern paranormal horror—sudden apparitions, strobe-like light scares, and isolated-set killings—then intensifies them with superhero-scale brutality. The result is effective in moments of shock, particularly when mundane defenses fail against inhuman strength, but those moments feel like horror set dressing on top of an underdeveloped speculative premise.
Dialogue and plot mechanics sometimes strain credibility. Characters piece together evidence through intuition and circumstantial cues rather than through believable investigation, and their realizations often arrive when the script needs them to rather than as earned conclusions. That undercuts the narrative momentum and leaves character choices feeling convenient rather than organic.
Despite these flaws, the film contains powerful scenes. The most affecting is Kyle’s attempt to stop Brandon by force. David Denman delivers a performance anchored in heartbreak and paternal desperation; when bullets fail and loss becomes literal, the emotional weight is undeniable. That moment—father against son, brutal and irreversible—offers one of the clearest statements of the film’s dark premise and lands as the most tragic and memorable sequence.
Where Brightburn could have distinguished itself further was by spending more time in Brandon’s perspective. Early sequences include glimpses of his view, but the film quickly shifts to victims’ perspectives as the horror ramps up. Showing more of Brandon’s interiority—his confusion, curiosity or growing alignment with whatever intelligence guides him—would have added dimension and amplified the unsettling contrast between a familiar childhood and alien menace.
Brightburn is an ambitious mash-up of genres. It succeeds at creating dread and delivering shocking, cinematic violence, and it offers a provocative premise: a Superman figure turned monster. But its choice to favor horror tropes over character-driven exploration prevents it from fully realizing the philosophical and emotional implications of that premise. For viewers looking for jump scares and visceral spectacle, Brightburn delivers. For those hoping for a thought-provoking subversion of the superhero origin story, it leaves too many questions unresolved.
8/24