It's inevitable that Robert will be compared to Chucky and Annabelle, which is probably the pitch this movie going for. Neither dolls are perfectly harrowing, but even then Robert has no right of being lined with them. The movie is strictly poorly written and acted. Characters do nothing but scream to each other, and even worse, the wife is so unsympathetically annoying she makes the movie unbearable.
You know the story already, a creepy doll talking to the kid and ruining the family. However, the worse criminal is the wife with her ear-rupturing high pitch voice. One can argue that the boy is expressionless or the husband seems detached, they are nothing compared to the terrible delivery of the wife. She literally screeches and shouts the entire movie, it's a torture beyond what the family has to deal with on-screen. It's like hearing dying animal every five minutes.
Plot doesn't go beyond the typical "who did it" theme and the paranoid wife. It move so horribly slow, when it hits one hour mark it only tells stuff other movies had done in half the span. The horror itself consists of poor editing worse than old stop footage movie. It feels amateurish at best and completely ruins the thrill, which barely exists in the first place.
When an inanimate object with creepy face plastered on it has better screen presence than the character, you know you're in for a terrible ride.
