The film centers on Ted (Jared Breeze) an overly bored 9 year boy who lives alone with his dad (David Morse). They run a motel that has seen better days. Ted stays busy "baiting" the roadway and getting paid a bounty for roadkill. He has developed an unhealthy fascination about death. We later find out his goal is to be united with his mother, somewhere in Florida.

The film is an interesting character study as we wonder about the near sociopath nature of Ted arising from the desire for companionship and not being able to achieve it. Guests pop in and out from time to time and Ted manages to maintain an unacceptable relationship with the guests, spurned on by his frustration and desire.

Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

The summer of 1989. Troubled 9-year-old boy Ted Henley (a remarkable performance by Jared Breeze) lives with his weary alcoholic father John (a fine portrayal by David Morse),who runs a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere. Ted befriends mysterious drifter William Colby (well played by Rainn Wilson); the prickly relationship between the two gives Ted the necessary impetus to give in to his darkest impulses.

Director Craig William Macneill, who also co-wrote the spare, yet incisive script with Clay McLeod Chapman, brings a thoroughly plausible and captivating lived-in quality to the intriguing premise: Macneill's simple no-frills style, the deliberate pace, the drab and desolate setting, and the beautifully bleak and brooding tone along with a potently unsetting sense of underlying dread all merge perfectly together to persuasively show how a lethal combination of boredom, loneliness, and parental neglect can cause an angry little boy to slowly, but surely transform into a stone cold killer. The final act of brutal incendiary violence packs a jolting punch right to the gut that's made all the more disturbing because it comes across as both logical and inevitable in equal measure. A genuinely unnerving powerhouse.

I'm honestly struggling to capture what the moral/main theme of this film might be. Wait, perhaps I got it now! If your young child grows up in a practically isolated geographical location, where you don't give him too much parental attention and allow for his that his best pals are roadkill carcasses, then there's a fair chance he'll turn into a little freak with maniacal tendencies and limited social skills. Wow, really? Thanks for the advice; I'll try not to let that happen to my own son.

Alright, I'm exaggerating perhaps, but there honestly isn't too much else to learn from Craig William Macneill's "The Boy"! Admirers and wannabe intellectual cinephiles might claim that the film gives a lesson in tension-building and character development, but that's hardly defendable. "The Boy" starts out boring, the entire middle-section is boring, and the climax is frustratingly boring! Since 1960, since Norman Bates in "Psycho" in other words, we already know that remote and ramshackle roadside motels aren't ideal places for the mental development of vulnerable young men, so the overlong and supposedly harrowing story of single father David Morse trying to give space and liberty to his 9-year-old son Ted is redundant, uninteresting and pathetic. There is absolutely nothing happening throughout 2/3 of the film, unless you find tire-swinging or scooping up dead squirrels a fascinating sight. Then, when you hope the action might finally shift into a higher gear because the motel is suddenly filled with disposable teenagers during their senior prom after party, "The Boy" incomprehensibly becomes even more cowardly and dull. The least that we, patient and tolerant viewers, deserved to see was a psychopathic rampage and not a lousy mass-murdering! I usually have a lot of sympathy for both David Morse and Rainn Wilson, but they shouldn't feel forced to star in over-ambitious but substantially void projects like these, just because they assume it'll look good on their resumes. The only 45 seconds in "The Boy" that I truly enjoyed were the ones during which Jefferson Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop us" was playing on the radio.