A fine quartet but a well-worn plot
Boy Erased (15) Verdict: Unoriginal but watchable ★★★✩✩ ★★
LAST year, a fine film called The Miseducation Of Cameron Post told the story of an American teenage lesbian who was sent by her very religious aunt to a conversion therapy centre, in the hope that she might be ‘cured’ of her homosexuality. These places really do exist.
Boy Erased covers pretty much exactly the same ground, except that the gender is different and this film is based on an actual memoir. It’s nicely acted, with Lucas Hedges excelling as Jared, the gay teen despatched for therapy by his appalled father (Russell Crowe), who also happens to be a lay preacher.
At first, Jared’s mother (Nicole Kidman in a peroxide wig weirdly reminiscent of Miranda Richardson playing the doomed Ruth Ellis in Dance With A Stranger) goes along with this ghastly plan.
Maybe it was a familiarity with the subject matter that made me feel the film dragged unnecessarily in places and was also wholly predictable, with conscious echoes of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Still, a quartet of performances make it worth seeing. The fourth of them comes from Joel Edgerton, who is also the writer and director, as the centre’s dubiously-qualified principal. That yields the small quirk of all three adult leads being Antipodean, in a film set in Arkansas.