When I first heard about The Carpenter's Son, I thought it was going to be a sacrilegious over-the-top horror movie anchored by another memorably outrageous performance from Nicholas Cage.
How could it not be with Cage playing The Father, a character clearly meant to evoke Joseph of Holy Family renown?
The movie opens with a title card that suggests that director Lotfy Nathan has something different in mind. His story, we're told, has been adapted from the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a book that deals with parts of Jesus's early life you won't find in the New Testament.
Those who see the movie will understand why a gospel that's not widely read by most Christians has been deemed heretical by Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox clergy.
To begin with, The Carpenter is an agonized doubter about his son (Noah Jupe). Frustrated and desperate for answers, he wonders whether he's The Boy's "real" father. At one point, anger gets the best of him and he rants about how The Mother -- played by rapper FKA Twigs - might have had sex with a Roman soldier and, therefore, became unclean.
Twig and Cage seem don't look like they belong in the same movie, but only The Mother seems certain about The Boy's identity. The Boy himself seeks answers and is only beginning to understand that he has supernatural powers -- and I don't mean this in the superhero sense of the word.
From the moment of his birth, The Boy faces danger. After a screaming birth scene, The Carpenter and The Mother take flight. The movie then leaps ahead to 15 AD. To avoid exposure, the Carpenter keeps moving his family around Egypt, finally settling in an eerie-looking village. A local merchant hires The Carpenter to carve an idol, a sure sign that something -- perhaps many things -- will go wrong.
The heart of the movie involves The Boy's encounter with a village child called The Stranger (
Isla Johnston). We immediately know that The Stranger is Satan because Johnston has a fierce gaze and speaks with a beautiful British accent that's unlike any other in the movie.
If you see Johnston's work, you'll instantly know why director Baz Luhrmann cast her to play Joan of Arc in his upcoming Jehanne d'Arc. Even as the devil, there's something grounded yet spectral about his young actress.
As played by Jupe, The Boy seems a bit of an adolescent misfit, although the story takes place long before anyone knew there was such a thing as adolescence. When The Boy has sleep-disrupting dreams about the crucifixion that awaits him, he wakes up screaming. His sometimes rambunctious behavior angers The Father, who frequently runs out of patience for the strange, preoccupied Boy.
A creepy torture chamber -- crucifixions and other forms of horrible punishment -- can be found on the village's outskirts, adding a further disturbing note. Watch out for snakes.
Lilith (Souheila Yacoub), a young woman who catches The Boy's attention (make of that what you will) suffers demonic possession and winds up in this doomed section of the village. We await The Boy's intervention.
Can Satan lure The Boy away from his true calling, thus marking what might be deemed the First Temptation of Christ?
I suppose you already know the answer, but this darkly hued, sometimes creepy, and determinedly strange movie is neither a horror movie nor a conventional piece of religious storytelling.
The Carpenter's Son sets its story in a Manichaean world of light and darkness, but, in the end, I'm not sure what the movie captures -- other than a rare instance in Cage can't seem to find his footing, in which Twigs doesn't quite fit, and cosmic issues are supposed to vault over everything.
Whatever the movie had it mind, it's definitely not operating in the world as we know it, but that doesn't mean it's clear what world it's meant to occupy and, equally important, why it's taking us there.
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