Nicolas Cage's Religious Thriller Film Isn't as Wild as It Sounds

Nicolas Cage is likely the ideal pick for a audacious horror film focused on Jesus Christ, but not for the causes certain audiences might assume. Actually, Cage does not actually play the central religious figure in The Carpenter’s Son: his role is listed only as a craftsman. He is framed as the Joseph in this story, striving to keep his faith while The Boy (played by Noah Jupe), their teenage adopted son, begins to show divine powers. The reason it’s difficult to picture another prominent performer taking this character is that even as the figure grows burdened with multiple trials, Cage himself seems nearly touchingly confident that the murky, somber small film is a valuable project.

Cage's Recent Projects

Cage was allocating those years more carefully recently. He still stars in more films than the majority of regular audiences will ever see — for example, were you informed that the actor has completed a trio of separate Westerns in the past three years? — however he also adds esteemed A24/Neon gigs like one recent hit, Pig, and a further title. This new film sounds like in that category, as it’s borderline horror, potentially provocative, and takes a campy-sounding concept with gravity.

The Film's Plot and Execution

Regrettably, writer-director Lotfy Nathan does not reward the audience's focus. The film starts from a engagingly rootless context, marketed as drawing from an obscure religious text concerning the youthful days of the messiah. Cage's character, The Mother, and their child move from place to place, anxious of religious persecution or distrust about The Boy’s strange powers. “Calamity follows us,” The Carpenter mournfully notes. This persists as evil influences attack the household in their latest settlement, beginning on the well-known scriptural test for the youth.

Occasionally, the film echoes an Exorcist-style possession movie, except that no one of the central roles are directly possessed. Rather, they grow increasingly alienated mutually, as these powers infect a local young woman (the actress, credited as an outsider) who The Boy bonds with, and provides each character unsettling premonitions of a dark tomorrow. The Carpenter especially fights with his position in the narrative, occasionally scolding the boy who mystifies him.

Debate and Care

This material is apt to stir disagreement, and the director treats it with plenty of delicacy — too much, possibly. The concept of a young man dealing with his eventual sacrifice and seduced by unknown powers is truly frightening, but Nathan may be hesitant regarding looking exploitative and keen to signal his goals, so he often falls back on dimly foreboding filming. The figures brood incessantly — FKA Twigs, who showed genuine potential in another movie, interestingly — yields her role to her character's costume, occasionally interrupted by a few disturbing frightening scenes.

Cage's Acting and Movie's Flaws

At the same time, Cage toy with just the sort of melodramatic acting that his ironic fans could be expecting. There is a moment (also included) in previews in which he flips out and yells “My belief is broken!” If that kind of theatrical release is part of your religious scary film, perhaps a more openly absurd method would make better use of the actor's readiness to be extreme if needed. Rather, The Carpenter’s Son is closer to the weaker direct-to-video films Cage made over that period — apart from the B-movies instead the narrative films and ghost stories that always sound promising, and often contain several notable Cage moments, but in the end seem like, well, low-budget DTV material.

Frankly, some of those, while less ambitious, were easier to view as a whole. This is when I must disregard my own dogma, not spiritual but work-oriented: Previously, a beloved editor urged me to banish words like “boring” or “dull” from my film-criticism vocabulary. These words communicate minimal but a individual and generically described restlessness, avoiding the job of vibrantly communicating the thoughtful and feeling of seeing a particular movie. It’s difficult to express boredom without appearing dull personally. It’s no more expressive as labeling a movie “notable.” “Say more,” that is.

Yet, I acknowledge, I felt uninterested throughout The Carpenter’s Son. In its defense, it’s a devotional type of stultification, not for The Carpenter’s Son is preachy, but because it takes a type of obedient endurance to watch it. After a while early on, the movie enters a monotonous pattern of simmering anguish, and does not