Lotfy Nathan's unprovocative religious horror film makes the life of Jesus seem terrifying to everyone but the audience.
An irredeemably inert religious horror film based on the apocryphal "Gospel of the Infancy of Thomas" (unlike the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament, which are obviously composed solely of irrefutable facts), Lotfy Nathan's "The Carpenter's Son" begins with a premise so clear that even a skeptical pagan like myself can appreciate its truth: it would have been absolutely terrifying for the son of God to suddenly appear in this world. Beautiful, too, at times, but equally terrifying. For everyone.
Director: Lotfy Nathan
Writer: Lotfy Nathan
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
For his mother (FKA Twigs, whose artistic talent is wasted in a film that only wants her for her expression), whose unwavering faith in his infant origins only intensifies her fear of the pagans burning babies on the road outside the village. For his father (Nicolas Cage), a tormented and anxious craftsman who can't shake the suspicion that his son was sent from below rather than from above.
For the Child himself (Noah Jupe, whose character is not mentioned due to copyright reasons), whose ability to heal lepers, raise the dead, and—most perversely—kill with a glance, adds an extra dimension to the anxieties of puberty. And for everyone else in the bleak Galilean village where Jesus the Child and his family have recently sought refuge from the devil in 15 AD, uneducated idolaters who don't understand why their local market has become the epicenter of the struggle for humanity's future.
The only ones for whom this situation isn't terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing more than the purgatorial lethargy of enduring a film 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”) approached the project with a budding fascination for the intricacies of that theology, discovering that Jesus’s formative years would provide fertile ground for the ultimate crisis of faith. As the Infancy Gospel of Thomas recounts, the Child was never closer to reality than in his adolescence, when, driven by emotions, he begins to feel that his father is the most oppressive force in the world; in his adolescence, when, taciturn and melancholic, he reaches his full potential and is naturally more drawn to the forces of evil that tempt him to use it than to his parents, who ask him to hide it.
Will the Child find the resolve to sacrifice himself for our sins? Or will he be seduced by the Stranger (a scarred and brooding Isla Johnston, personifying utter darkness, whose trembling conviction explains why Baz Luhrmann cast her in the lead role of his Joan of Arc epic), who whispers in his ear, “You will die for wretched people, and no one will thank you for it”? Spoiler alert: Christianity has since become a very popular religion.
But while this story of how a generic Jesus came to see himself on the cross understandably focuses more on the journey than the destination, “The Carpenter’s Son” immediately falters as to how it could possibly give that journey any special meaning. The essence of Nathan’s approach is to explore 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 glimmers of divine light. It’s an approach that leads the filmmaker to immerse this story in an impenetrable atmosphere of misery. Joyless, formless, and with the same texture as a dull ringing in the ears.
Paranoid before becoming petulant, Cage's performance finally succumbs to the high-flying terminal that has always been his plan B when he doesn't have a real character to play, but his opening, sleepwalking voiceover sets the tone for the oppressive melancholy that pervades the film. "He possesses a power he doesn't understand," the Carpenter says of his son as they trudge through the desert in search of a new hiding place. "A power I cannot contain. Calamity pursues us." That calamity is, of course, "Se-TAHN," who stalks these characters in the shadows, while Simon Beaufils's austere yet gloomily lit 35mm cinematography offers the "Stranger" a multitude of places to hide.
However, for the most part, the Stranger walks in plain sight, taking the form of an androgynous adolescent—his scarred face betraying the wounds of heavenly rejection—who goads the Child into giving free rein to his darkest impulses. So what if he spies on the beautiful, mute neighbor as she showers outside her house? Who cares if he exacts unholy revenge on the mean Torah teacher?
Nathan focuses his attention on the torment of a world that has ample reason to doubt the mercy of a divine creator. While he demonstrates a nascent ability to instill certain terrors in his victims (the scene in which Lilith is ripped from her bed with a silent scream is particularly effective), his ambivalence toward the language of horror cinema prevents "The Carpenter's Son" from channeling the sacred terror necessary to counteract its apathetic approach to characterization. Too over-the-top to be taken literally and too routine to add a lasting visceral element to this well-known myth, the scares become tiresome faster than a bad sermon.
There is a hint of Luciferian menace in some of the film's infernal imagery (for example, a hole in the ground that turns out to be filled with 1,000 writhing bodies), but nothing Nathan imagines is half as disturbing as the reality experienced by the boy's followers. It makes sense: if you cure a leper with your touch, he'll probably show up at your house in the middle of the night hoping for another miracle. But it's difficult to grasp how the despair of "the unclean" affects the Boy, as Nathan's script mistakes a monotonous atmosphere for psychological depth, and Jupe's performance—a mix of teenage angst and a mane of angelic curls—is unable to transform the situation.
Torn between exploring the Boy's inner turmoil and testing the Carpenter's resolve, the film never finds a convincing way to juxtapose the two. While there's a universal quality to the constant father-son feuds that push these characters to the extremes of their beliefs, neither storyline is developed enough to extract anything worthwhile from their spiritual battle of wills (a battle that pales in comparison to the tortuous stalemate in Johnston's performance, which oozes with agonizing hatred). At its best, “The Carpenter’s Son” feels like a heavy mix between “Last Days in the Desert” and “Brightburn”: flat, empty, and threatened by the shapeless potential of a god’s raw power.
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