‘The Carpenter’s Son’ Review: Biblical Fantasy Meets Elevated Horror

When lately requested about Nicolas Cage’s need to work with him, Robert Eggers acknowledged that he would discover it a problem to suit the actor, given his intense aura of “modernity,” into the interval works that the Nosferatu director is devoted to creating. With that in thoughts, Cage’s efficiency in writer-director Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son, a biblical fantasy whose dreary, static solemnity actually bears echoes of Eggers’s work, might be seen as one thing of a stealth audition. However it’s tough to think about Cage’s subdued function inside it making a lot of an impression on both his trade friends or his rabid fanbase.

Impressed by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Nathan’s movie follows an adolescent Jesus (Noah Jupe) as he travels by way of the Roman Egypt desert together with his mom, Mary (FKA twigs), and father, Joseph (Cage). Going to nice lengths to cover their identities, the household takes refuge in a rural village, and it’s there that Jesus’s powers start to manifest, a lot to the curiosity of their new neighbors. He additionally begins a tentative dalliance with a mysterious and mischievous woman (Isla Johnston) of the identical age, who encourages the boy’s powers for doubtful ends. As quickly as Jesus begins to exhibit aggressive and vindictive conduct, it turns into clear that his manipulative new playmate is none apart from the embodiment of Devil.

Nathan, who started his profession in documentary with the evocative neighborhood portrait 12 O’Clock Boys, initially appears to aspire to the verité high quality of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel In response to St. Matthew, and even Martin Scorsese’s The Final Temptation of Christ, with Simon Beaufils’s digital camera traversing the desert landscapes and the figures that populate them with vivid immediacy. Any try at critical theological inquiry, although, quickly turns into subsumed in a number of chintzy supernatural shenanigans that flip Nathan’s movie into an all-too-familiar “elevated horror” extravaganza. However The Carpenter’s Son fails to even supply respectable frights, until one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes significantly scary.

Narratively, the movie takes the type of a simplistic coming-of-age story, with the younger Jesus’s revolt in opposition to Joseph’s strict mentorship positioned as a heightened present of typical teenage angst. Jupe signifies his inside battle by stomping round with a furrowed forehead, which stays unwavering whether or not he’s marvelling at bringing a useless cricket again to life or throwing demon-influenced mood tantrums when he begins to find the reality of his holy origins. In the meantime, as Mary, twigs is confined to sitting silently on the sidelines, an immaculate object whose sole function is to flash expressions of obscure concern on the proceedings.

As for Cage, his efficiency is unusually muted, maybe to maintain according to the strained seriousness of The Carpenter’s Son. However contemplating that the movie does ultimately devolve into the type of B-movie hokum that the actor has so usually gleefully hooked up himself to, it’s disappointing to witness the diploma to which he’s allowed himself to be reined in. Reportedly, Cage was attacked by bees at one level through the movie’s harsh shoot, which brings to thoughts his iconic camp flip in Neil LaBute’s remake of The Wicker Man. Had The Carpenter’s Son possessed the anything-goes vitality of that movie, then it could have been in a position to breathe some contemporary life into its supply materials, reasonably than really feel so maddeningly caught within the mud.