After a home invasion renders their son (Christopher Convery) mute, a traumatised family leaves London for somewhere they feel safe: an isolated mansion in the woods whose previous inhabitants killed themselves.

After the box office success of 2016’s The Boy, porcelain doll and future Tory prime minister Brahms is back in this 2020 sequel. And like so many prime ministers, he makes his predecessor look good by comparison. The Boy may have been as dull as Marie Kondo’s doll’s house, but it understood the dumb horror movie brief, with a catchy WTF premise and the partially redeeming twist (spoiler alert) that the doll wasn’t actually haunted. It was actually a man who lives in the walls or something.

But in Brahms: The Boy II that goes out the window faster than you can type “how to identify your antique doll” into Google (which they do). After they realise the serial number was upside down (it was H909, not 606H!), it turns out the doll is in fact haunted (which explains his side-parting) and is hellbent on wearing a cardigan and occasionally turning on the TV. This freaks out the mum (Katie Holmes) who is presumably triggered by Brahms’ resemblance to Tom Cruise, but was too busy neglecting her son to do the most basic research into their new murder house.

The outcome is more depressing domestic drama than horror movie, with such an unlikeable central family that by the time the son does start speaking you wish the attack had been more serious. It even has the porcelain balls to set up a sequel (surely called Brahms: Requiem), which makes this film’s financial failure and the news that the studio that made it no longer exists sound as soothing as a lullaby.