87 min | PG-13 | February 21, 2020 | STX Films
A grieving family moves to the English countryside to start over, and the boy finds a porcelain doll buried in the woods. He names it Brahms and starts taking orders from it. The doll is the only one in the house with anything to do.
A home invasion leaves Liza traumatized and her son Jude mute. The family relocates to a guest house on the grounds of the cursed estate from the first film. Jude unearths a porcelain doll, cleans it off, and begins treating it as a friend with rules. The film wants to be about a mother watching her child retreat into something she cannot reach. It abandons that idea early and settles for a doll that makes furniture move.
Katie Holmes plays Liza as a woman holding panic just under the surface. She does the work of selling fear in empty rooms. The script gives her nothing to fear that earns the effort. Christopher Convery plays Jude with a blank stillness that reads as creepy for a while and then as a single note held too long. Owain Yeoman plays the father Sean as a man who keeps insisting everything is fine, which is the only function the part contains. Ralph Ineson appears as a groundskeeper named Joseph to deliver warnings that the film treats as plot mechanics rather than dread.
William Brent Bell returns to direct from a script by Stacey Menear, and the two reverse the one idea that made the original work. The 2016 film hid its monster in plain sight. This one shows the doll moving in the first act and spends the rest manufacturing jump scares around it. The cinematography drains the country house of color until every room looks like the same gray box. The score telegraphs each scare with a swell of strings seconds before anything happens. There is no tension when the music announces the timing in advance.
The closing act invents a new mythology for the doll that contradicts the premise the original built. It trades the psychological for the supernatural and explains the mystery into nothing. A film about a traumatized mother and a silent child has a real movie inside it. This is not that film. It is a brand extension that mistakes a moving doll for a reason to exist.