Brightburn Review
Funny thing about this movie is that it was released a year after Superman's 80th anniversary. At the cost of reiterating what I said in my Zombieland 1 and 2 reviews this is essentially a perfect addition to all those evil children movies from the 70s/80s, from The Omen to The Godsend (if not the two Exorcist films), when you use its horror based premise to divide that anniversary number by 2. Essentially 1938 was 81 years ago, around the time of this film's release. 81 ÷ 2 = 40.5, and 1938 + 40.5 = 1978, which was around the time that trend was still kicking. Granted that even without anything related to the occult (at least implicitly) do the visuals still manage to bring you back to the aesthetic (especially during the horror based scenes, where they start out highly subtle yet as far as pay potential homage to Zombi, and the exploitative nature of those same 70s by the time it's about to hit an hour). Of course when you come around to it this is very much essentially The Godsend meets Hereditary, except the character of Brandon is pseudo omniscient, indestructible and the scene with a creepy notebook is amplified to American Psycho degrees. I guess one more thing I can add is that I never really got why people found this movie "played it safe" or "didn't take its premise that far". When you're essentially remaking Superman's origin story for the same genre as Carrie or Nightmare on Elm Street you're not exactly portraying the main character as the protagonist. As for the horror based elements this would be the equivalent of criticising the alien from Nope for not being more akin to the bugs from Starship Troopers: it's very much horror, even if its blending, and juggling, of genres is a tricky subjective tightrope walk as it is.