The opening text of The Carpenter’s Son (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) reveals that it’s inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an unofficial, apocryphal Gospel that makes suppositions about what Jesus Christ was up to during the periods of his life that aren’t in the Bible. It stars Nicolas Cage as the J-man’s father Joseph, and before your eyes widen too far, leave room for the missed opportunity here, namely, that he should’ve played Jesus’ REAL dad, for obvious reasons – I mean, he’s ALREADY God, right? Cage’s involvement inevitably has us baseline-curious and maybe scratching our heads, but the revelation that this is a Biblical tale AND a horror movie amps the anticipatory rating here to Kook Factor 10. If only the movie were as interesting in execution than in concept.
The Gist: First things first: The credits refer to the characters as The Carpenter, The Mother and The Boy, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll hereby refer to them by their Christian names. We meet Mary (FKA Twigs) in a cave, screaming, giving birth. Joseph (Cage) frets. Something’s going on outside. A commotion. The child arrives, there is a great light, and then they pack up and venture out, where they see Roman soldiers throwing babies on a fire. This is something most would deem not very nice. But the family has hidden their new miracle in the wrappings on their donkey and when a Roman searches them he finds nothing, and they move on to AD 15, where Cage-Joseph whispers in a miserable voiceover that they live in hiding because their child “threatens (others’) gods with his presence,” while they clamber over the world’s most miserable rocks to a new home where nobody knows who they are – not yet anyway, because being Jesus danged Christ himself (Noah Jupe) likely wasn’t easy to keep a lid on, even in the days before the internet.
Joseph gets to nailing shut the windows in their hovel so no one can see the divinity within, but Jesus gets a peek at the neighbor girl Lilith (Souheila Yacoub) all nakey first. Lilith is mute, but another girl in town (Isla Johnston) says lots of things to Jesus, e.g., she knows who he really is. This is Temptation With A Capital T because Jesus doesn’t know who he really is and his parents ain’t telling. Let it be known that this other girl lives among the sick and condemned people and is covered with strange scratches and scars, and glowers in a manner that would really get the Church Lady puckering. There’s a bit where she takes Jesus to the local torture spot, where officials crucify folks who are deemed guilty of “sorcery,” and another bit where she shows him a sleeping leper and pushes him so he falls atop the terribly infected man. Later that night the leprous man appears from the darkness fully non-leprous. Whoops!
This whole time, Joseph has been trying to protect Jesus by being a joyless scold who makes the kid pray all the time, and locks him up in a wooden cage that Jesus can easily escape. It’s not Jesus Magic – he can just reach through the bars and slide the latch open. I don’t understand the logic or why we see him do this roughly three dozen times but let’s not get hung up here. It’s a good cop/bad cop situation in the house, with Mary being the nice nurturing one and Joseph being moronically punitive by making the kid stay in a cage where he can come and go as he pleases. Jesus starts having strange, very loud, somnambulant, visionary dreams in which he can foresee things, like his own brutal death on the cross, and the problem is that he’s loud enough to wake the neighbors and make them wonder if that is indeed the Son of God next door. Looks like the cat’s getting out of the bag here, and once it’s out, there’s no putting it back in.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, The Carpenter’s Son isn’t as gory as The Passion of the Christ or as heretically blasphemous (blasphemously heretical?) as The Last Temptation of Christ or as scary as The Omen or as riveting as The Witch, but it does exist, and that counts for something!
Performance Worth Watching: I appreciated Johnston’s reasonably chilling work here as That Guy, although this might’ve been a more enjoyable film if Cage had been playing him.
Sex And Skin: A brief shot over Jesus’ lusty, lusty shoulder of Lilith washing up.
Our Take: Now that we’ve watched the film, let’s downgrade it to Kook Factor 2. Again: A Bible-spinoff story that’s a horror movie starring Nicolas “The Madman” Cage as Joseph should be far more compelling than this turgid, dramatically arid slog. Writer/director Lotfy Nathan fatally splinters the narrative focus – The Carpenter’s Son is ostensibly about 15-year-old Jesus’ coming of age, his self-discovery as a man of great power, and how the kid wrangles with daddy issues like no other person in history has had, considering his adoptive pops is played by Nicolas “The Madman” Cage and his biological father is an all-powerful invisible man in the sky who created everything.
A movie with interest in being, well, interesting might lean into that last point, because that’s a doozy of a whopper of a mindf— for a teenager in any day or age. But we don’t get any meaningful exploration of Jesus’ character because Nathan pulls focus and spends considerable time with his biggest-name star, whose performance is simultaneously noncommittal, stereotypically Cage Goofy and utterly forgettable, and therefore a fine representative of this occasionally weird but primarily bland movie as a whole. Nathan frankly doesn’t show much vision or purpose thematically or visually; the film’s horror components are shrugworthy (lotsa CGI snakes) and its tepid dramatic overtures are lost in the pancake-flat, dead-serious tone. You’ll want to grab The Carpenter’s Son by its lapels and tell it to just go for broke, leap off the rails, piss people off, rub the cat the wrong way, cant an angle, throw in a car chase, something, anything please, but it never does.
Our Call: Oh, and one of the characters pronounces “Satan” as “Sat on.” Get the eff outta here. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.