A hopelessly inert religious horror film based on the apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (as opposed to the four canonical gospels of The New Testament, which are obviously all composed of nothing but hard facts), Lotfy Nathan’s “The Carpenter’s Son” begins with a premise so crystalline that even a skeptical heathen like me can appreciate its truth: It would have been absolutely terrifying if the son of God suddenly rocked up on this mortal coil. Beautiful, too, at times, but also terrifying. For everyone.
For his Mother (FKA Twigs, her power as an artist wasted in a movie that only wants her for her pout), whose steadfast faith in her infant provenance only makes her more afraid of the baby-burning pagans on the highway outside of town. For his Father (Nicolas Cage), a haunted and high-strung craftsman who can’t shake the suspicion that his son might have been sent from below rather than above. For the Boy himself (Noah Jupe, his character unnamed for copyright reasons), whose ability to heal lepers, bring the dead back to life, and — more nefariously — kill people just by looking at them adds an extra dimension to the anxieties of puberty. And for everyone else in the sad Galilean village where Jesus the Boy and his family have most recently taken refuge from the devil in 15 A.D., uneducated idol-worshippers who can’t understand why their local marketplace has become ground zero in the fight over humanity’s future.
The only people for whom this situation isn’t terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing but the purgatorial torpor of sitting through a movie that’s too afraid of its own concept to do anything truly provocative with it.
Raised in the Coptic Orthodox Christian church, Nathan (“12 O’Clock Boys,” “Harka”) came to the project with an inchoate fascination with the marginalia of that theology, and found that Jesus’ formative years would be ripe material for the ultimate crisis of faith. As the Infancy Gospel of Thomas would have it, the Boy was never more relatable than he was as a horny adolescent who’s starting to feel like his father is the most oppressive force on earth; as a sullen and moppy teenager who’s coming into his full power, and naturally finds himself more compelled by the evil forces that encourage him to use it than he is by his parents who tell him to hide it away.
Will the Boy find the resolve to sacrifice himself for our sins? Or will he be seduced by the Stranger (a scarred and scowling Isla Johnston as the personification of all darkness, her tremulous conviction making it easy to understand why Baz Luhrmann cast her in the lead role of his Joan of Arc epic), who whispers into his ear, “You will die for miserable people, and you will not be thanked”? Spoiler alert: Christianity has since become a very popular religion.
But if this story of how generic-brand Jesus came to see himself on the cross is understandably more about the journey than the destination, “The Carpenter’s Son” finds itself at an immediate loss as to how it could meaningfully texture that path. The essence of Nathan’s approach is to approximate how difficult it must have been for ancient peoples to maintain their faith in a world of darkness — a world desperate for even the faintest traces of divine light. It’s an approach that leads the filmmaker to steep this story in an impenetrable air of miserablism; joyless, without shape, and no more textured than the sound of a dull ringing in your ears.
Paranoid before it turns petulant, Cage’s performance eventually gives way to the high rising terminal that has always been his fallback plan in the absence of a real character to play (“My faith has been SHAAAATTTEREEDD because of you!” is the closest he gets to a memorable line delivery here), but his somnambulant opening voiceover sets the tone for the brooding sluggishness of the film to come. “He bears a power he cannot understand,” the Carpenter says of his son as they trudge through the desert in search of a new place to hide. “A power I cannot contain. Calamity follows us.” That calamity is, of course, “Se-TAHN,” who creeps around these characters in the shadows, Simon Beaufils’ rugged but drearily underlit 35mm cinematography offering “the Stranger” plenty of places to hide.
For the most part, however, the Stranger waltzes around in plain sight, adopting the form of an androgynous teen — their scarred face betraying the wounds of Heaven’s rejection — who baits the Boy into indulging his darkest impulses. So what if he sneaks a peek at the beautiful, non-verbal neighbor girl as she showers outside of her house? Who cares if he takes an unholy measure of revenge against the mean-spirited Torah teacher who’s spiteful towards his strange wisdom? These people will crucify him the first chance they get. Might as well spike their food with scorpion venom.
Nathan devotes the brunt of his attention to the torment of a world that has every reason to doubt the mercy of a divine creator. Though he displays a half-developed knack for visiting certain frights upon his victims (the scene in which Lillith is pulled out of her bed with a silent scream is particularly effective), his ambivalence toward embracing the language of a horror film holds “The Carpenter’s Son” back from channeling the holy terror needed to combat its listless approach to characterization. Too heightened to take at face value and too rote to add a lastingly visceral element to this most famous of myths, the scares grow tedious faster than a bad church sermon. (There are only so many times you can watch someone gag on a computer-generated serpent.)
There’s a hint of Luciferean menace to some of the movie’s hellacious imagery (e.g., a hole in the ground revealed to be composed of 1,000 writhing bodies), but nothing Nathan cooks up is even half as unnerving as the reality of the Boy’s zealots. It makes sense: If you heal a leper with your touch, he’s probably gonna show up at your house in the middle of the night hoping for another miracle. But how the desperation of “the unclean” lands on the Boy is hard to parse, as Nathan’s script mistakes droning ambiance for psychological insight, and Jupe’s performance — all roiling teen angst topped with a mop of perfectly angelic curls — is powerless to turn whatever into fine.
Split between probing the Boy’s inner turmoil and testing the Carpenter’s resolve, the movie never finds a compelling way to play one against the other. While there’s a consciously universal quality to all of the father-son bickering that pushes these characters towards the extremes of their beliefs, neither arc is fleshed out enough to carve anything worth keeping from their spiritual battle of wills (a battle that pales in comparison to the tortured stalemate of Johnston’s performance, which rages with agonized hate). At its best, “The Carpenter’s Son” feels like a stolid cross between “Last Days in the Desert” and “Brightburn” — flat, empty, and threatened by the unformed potential of a god’s raw power.
More often, however, the film is as lost and miserable as any of the people in it. Nathan inevitably stumbles upon an answer that tries to make sense of their anguish, but he doesn’t seem to have any real faith in its meaning. He’s as incapable of articulating the Boy’s power as the Carpenter is at containing it, and so “The Carpenter’s Son” never escapes the sacred context of its subject, nor the sense of calamity that seems to follow him wherever he goes.
Grade: C-
Magnolia will release “The Carpenter’s Son” in theaters on Friday, November 14.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.