Dolls is a 2019 horror film about a children’s book author and his rebellious teenage daughter who move into a house they’ve inherited.
If you’ve come here hoping that a movie called Dolls is not going to be anything than what you expect – and seen a dozen times or more before – then I have bad news. It is exactly what you expect. But that’s obviously what director Cuyle Carvin is aiming for, the bar barely off the floor and he working to deliver just one more carbon copy of what really is the weirdest plot trope in the genre.
Moving into the house he just inherited from his mother, Robert Holbrook (Thomas Downey), a struggling children’s book author and burgeoning alcoholic, is looking for a place to wallow in his despair after leaving his cheating wife. Not there two minutes, he finds one of the dolls he remembers from childhood standing in the hallway, one of three now stored in the attic. Not giving it a thought, he then finds his seventeen-year-old daughter Sammey (Trinity Simpson) knocking on the door, having run away from her mother as well. Agreeing to let her stay for the weekend and reconnect, the dolls have other plans.
You want to have fun with a movie like this, the inherit silliness of taking seriously a story where dolls come to menacing life the very stuff of B-movie good times. Thank you, Chucky. There’s a modest effort in Dolls to be such a thing and for a time you might wonder if this is in fact a parody. When the elder next door neighbor Margaret (Dee Wallace) arrives, not knowing Robert’s mother had died and hearing about the attic dolls before running away in fear, you absolutely think this is a spoof. However, Dolls doesn’t have any fun with that, instead taking itself way too seriously in trying to convince us that Robert is dealing with troubling personal demons along with his rebellious daughter while evil-possessed dolls are somehow scurrying about the attic.
That’s the thing though in all this, its refusal to steer even for a moment into new territory with Sammey hopelessly bratty and Robert oblivious to just about everything. The dolls just sort of stand there and present no real fear, the budget clearly limiting what the filmmakers can do. And by the time we get an explanation for how the dolls came to life, well, I won’t spoil it though you’re probably right in what’s popping into your heads. It earns some chuckles, probably not intended.
Look, this is what it is, a generic chiller ticking off as much as it can from the Horror Movie Maker’s GuideBook, tasking you the good audience to simply let it be and enjoy the show as it retreads the same old story once more. The problem is that Dolls has no sense of wonder and worse, no joy in the exploration, simply doing what’s been done time and time again. For some, that’s enough. For the rest, this will be all too familiar.