The Playlist
Edgerton’s most successful scene centers on Jared’s slightly flirtatious friendship with a college running buddy, Henry (Joe Alwyn, fantastic). Their relationship takes an abrupt turn and Edgerton conveys this in a manner that’s horrifying, and it works because it’s one of the few times the consequences feel shockingly real.
Variety
“Boy Erased” feels like its greatest value will be to parents, particularly those with LGBT children of their own — and Crowe and Kidman have seldom been better in their supporting roles. So often, parents view this news as a reflection on themselves, searching to understand their own failings, or else looking for a way to repair the problem. For Garrard Conley, whose memoir inspired Edgerton’s film, sharing his story was the key to repairing things with his parents. Maybe there’s a lesson in there for us.
We Live Entertainment
There have been quite a few films about gay conversion therapy but Boy Erased is by far the best of all of them.
You can tell when watching Boy Erased that everyone involved felt connected to the story and wanted to make sure that the film adaptation was an honest retelling of what Conley experienced in his own life. The film is emotionally raw and brutally honest but never comes across as heavy-handed. We see Jared as an average teenager who is just trying to understand what’s happening to his body and why he is having these types of feelings.
Boy Erased is a powerful character-driven film that tells an essential story. It is a must-see film and is one of the best movies of 2018.
The Wrap
What to show, what not to show — that was the question. Edgerton navigates the boundary with grace and sensitivity.
Edgerton is an actor’s director, and thus no one in this film is given short shrift. Each has plenty of room to work out what’s happening in their own trajectories.
“Boy Erased” is a good movie and also an important one, one that might save lives if enough young people find their way to it. Likewise, it’s hoped that adults who chose to enter “treatment” on their own will get the message that self-acceptance is what matters. They don’t need to change. It is the world around them that must.
The Hollywood Reporter
Actors-turned-directors do not always have the command of cinematic technique that can be found in the work of auteurs with a different background. But these actor-filmmakers can generally be counted on to encourage and bolster compelling performances, and this is certainly one of the great strengths of Joel Edgerton’s second film as director, Boy Erased. Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and a uniformly splendid supporting cast — including Edgerton himself as a gay conversion therapist — deliver the goods in this heart-rending drama.
Boy Erased aims to influence the debate on gay conversion therapy that is still unresolved in many parts of the country, but it deserves praise not as a polemic but as a richly humanistic, emotionally searing drama that sticks in the memory.
Indiewire
“Boy Erased” uses a similar premise to deflect that burden outward — to put the onus for change and understanding on the misguided people who surround its traumatized young protagonist.
The result is a powerfully conflicted portrait of the relationship between love and hate, a story in which all but the ugliest bigotries can be traced back to a misguided sense of protection. While Edgerton’s fractured approach has a frustrating way of compartmentalizing his characters into their own subplots, making it hard for the movie to convey the full sweep of its emotional journey, “Boy Erased” regards everyone with such raw empathy that even its most difficult moments are fraught with the possibility of forgiveness.
Vanity Fair
Boy Erased is still a respectable effort, serious and sober, about a very real, very bad practice. The film’s heart is firmly in the right place. As is its head: there’s a terrific scene toward the end of the film in which Jared calmly, but with a tremble of emotion in his voice, lays out to his father what a continued relationship between the two of them would have to look like. It’s a smart, emphatic, direct piece of writing. And Hedges and Crowe are terrific together, as two men—one young and newly free with self-discovery, the other old and needing to reconsider toxic, long-held ideals—trying to lurch themselves forward together.
Maybe that is the something new that Boy Erased actually did show me: not another coming-out scene, but something past that. It’s an assertion of strength and principle and self-possession that feels pretty hard won. That’s nice to see. And when that gorgeous Sivan song cues up and the movie glides to a close—just as Jared’s life bittersweetly yawns open—the tears arrive. Any assessment of this film certainly shouldn’t erase that.