A hopelessly inert spiritual horror movie primarily based on the apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (versus the 4 canonical gospels of The New Testomony, that are clearly all composed of nothing however exhausting info), Lotfy Nathan’s “The Carpenter’s Son” begins with a premise so crystalline that even a skeptical heathen like me can admire its reality: It could have been completely terrifying if the son of God immediately rocked up on this mortal coil. Stunning, too, at instances, but additionally terrifying. For everybody.
For his Mom (FKA Twigs, her energy as an artist wasted in a film that solely needs her for her pout), whose steadfast religion in her toddler provenance solely makes her extra afraid of the baby-burning pagans on the freeway outdoors of city. For his Father (Nicolas Cage), a haunted and high-strung craftsman who can’t shake the suspicion that his son may need been despatched from beneath quite than above. For the Boy himself (Noah Jupe, his character unnamed for copyright causes), whose skill to heal lepers, deliver the lifeless again to life, and — extra nefariously — kill folks simply by taking a look at them provides an additional dimension to the anxieties of puberty. And for everybody else within the unhappy Galilean village the place Jesus the Boy and his household have most not too long ago taken refuge from the satan in 15 A.D., uneducated idol-worshippers who can’t perceive why their native market has develop into floor zero within the combat over humanity’s future.
The one folks for whom this example isn’t terrifying are us, the viewers, who really feel nothing however the purgatorial torpor of sitting by way of a film that’s too afraid of its personal idea to do something actually provocative with it.
Raised within the Coptic Orthodox Christian church, Nathan (“12 O’Clock Boys,” “Harka”) got here to the undertaking with an inchoate fascination with the marginalia of that theology, and located that Jesus’ youth could be ripe materials for the final word disaster of religion. Because the Infancy Gospel of Thomas would have it, the Boy was by no means extra relatable than he was as a attractive adolescent who’s beginning to really feel like his father is essentially the most oppressive pressure on earth; as a sullen and moppy teenager who’s coming into his full energy, and naturally finds himself extra compelled by the evil forces that encourage him to make use of it than he’s by his mother and father who inform him to cover it away.
Will the Boy discover the resolve to sacrifice himself for our sins? Or will he be seduced by the Stranger (a scarred and scowling Isla Johnston because the personification of all darkness, her tremulous conviction making it simple to know why Baz Luhrmann solid her within the lead position of his Joan of Arc epic), who whispers into his ear, “You’ll die for depressing folks, and you’ll not be thanked”? Spoiler alert: Christianity has since develop into a extremely popular faith.
But when this story of how generic-brand Jesus got here to see himself on the cross is understandably extra in regards to the journey than the vacation spot, “The Carpenter’s Son” finds itself at a direct loss as to the way it may meaningfully texture that path. The essence of Nathan’s strategy is to approximate how tough it should have been for historic peoples to keep up their religion in a world of darkness — a world determined for even the faintest traces of divine gentle. It’s an strategy that leads the filmmaker to steep this story in an impenetrable air of miserablism; joyless, with out form, and no extra textured than the sound of a boring ringing in your ears.
Paranoid earlier than it turns petulant, Cage’s efficiency finally offers technique to the excessive rising terminal that has at all times been his fallback plan within the absence of an actual character to play (“My religion has been SHAAAATTTEREEDD due to you!” is the closest he will get to a memorable line supply right here), however his somnambulant opening voiceover units the tone for the brooding sluggishness of the movie to return. “He bears an influence he can’t perceive,” the Carpenter says of his son as they trudge by way of the desert in quest of a brand new place to cover. “An influence I can’t include. Calamity follows us.” That calamity is, in fact, “Se-TAHN,” who creeps round these characters within the shadows, Simon Beaufils’ rugged however drearily underlit 35mm cinematography providing “the Stranger” loads of locations to cover.
For essentially the most half, nonetheless, the Stranger waltzes round in plain sight, adopting the type of an androgynous teen — their scarred face betraying the injuries of Heaven’s rejection — who baits the Boy into indulging his darkest impulses. So what if he sneaks a peek on the lovely, non-verbal neighbor woman as she showers outdoors of her home? Who cares if he takes an unholy measure of revenge in opposition to the mean-spirited Torah trainer who’s spiteful in the direction of his unusual knowledge? These folks will crucify him the primary likelihood they get. May as effectively spike their meals with scorpion venom.
Nathan devotes the brunt of his consideration to the torment of a world that has each cause to doubt the mercy of a divine creator. Although he shows a half-developed knack for visiting sure frights upon his victims (the scene wherein Lillith is pulled out of her mattress with a silent scream is especially efficient), his ambivalence towards embracing the language of a horror movie holds “The Carpenter’s Son” again from channeling the holy terror wanted to fight its listless strategy to characterization. Too heightened to take at face worth and too rote so as to add a lastingly visceral factor to this most well-known of myths, the scares develop tedious sooner than a foul church sermon. (There are solely so many instances you may watch somebody gag on a computer-generated serpent.)
There’s a touch of Luciferean menace to among the film’s hellacious imagery (e.g., a gap within the floor revealed to be composed of 1,000 writhing our bodies), however nothing Nathan cooks up is even half as unnerving as the fact of the Boy’s zealots. It is sensible: When you heal a leper along with your contact, he’s in all probability gonna present up at your home in the course of the night time hoping for one more miracle. However how the desperation of “the unclean” lands on the Boy is tough to parse, as Nathan’s script errors droning ambiance for psychological perception, and Jupe’s efficiency — all roiling teen angst topped with a mop of completely angelic curls — is powerless to show no matter into high-quality.
Cut up between probing the Boy’s inside turmoil and testing the Carpenter’s resolve, the film by no means finds a compelling technique to play one in opposition to the opposite. Whereas there’s a consciously common high quality to all the father-son bickering that pushes these characters in the direction of the extremes of their beliefs, neither arc is fleshed out sufficient to carve something price conserving from their religious battle of wills (a battle that pales compared to the tortured stalemate of Johnston’s efficiency, which rages with agonized hate). At its greatest, “The Carpenter’s Son” appears like a stolid cross between “Final Days within the Desert” and “Brightburn” — flat, empty, and threatened by the unformed potential of a god’s uncooked energy.
Extra typically, nonetheless, the movie is as misplaced and depressing as any of the folks in it. Nathan inevitably stumbles upon a solution that tries to make sense of their anguish, however he doesn’t appear to have any actual religion in its that means. He’s as incapable of articulating the Boy’s energy because the Carpenter is at containing it, and so “The Carpenter’s Son” by no means escapes the sacred context of its topic, nor the sense of calamity that appears to comply with him wherever he goes.
Grade: C-
Magnolia will launch “The Carpenter’s Son” in theaters on Friday, November 14.
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