This cartoonish horror film features Nicolas Cage and FKA Twigs as Joseph and Mary, parents to a teenage Jesus Christ who struggles to navigate his divine powers.
Look past the calcified religious mythos, and you can see that the life and times of Jesus Christ are fertile ground for the horror genre: the devil hissing about; demonic possession and sacrificial lambs; men nailed onto wooden crosses, left to suffer publicly until they died. It’s brutal, unsettling stuff. But these same elements are such ingrained, almost stodgy iconography that to graft the story of Jesus onto the template of a genre film is, if blasphemous to the faithful, and mainly just silly to everyone else.
It’s that tedious tension that the horror film “The Carpenter’s Son” can’t shake off. Based on the alternative Christian texts known as the Apocryphal Gospels, the movie follows a teenage Jesus Christ (Noah Jupe), whose strange abilities have turned him and his parents, Joseph (Nicolas Cage) and Mary (FKA Twigs), into nomadic pariahs.
Joseph can’t quite tell if his son’s supernatural aura is heaven-sent or satanic. Neither can Jesus himself. As the family enters a new village, an eerie teenager wielding a serpent toy begins trying to trap Jesus to use his powers for evil. Call it the first temptation of Christ.
It’s hard to take seriously, perhaps most of all because of Cage and Twigs, one of the most bizarre manifestations of Joseph and Mary one could ever conjure. Twigs’s Mary is a perpetually smoldering saint whose mothering of Jesus carries hints of the incestuous. But for Cage, whose late career has veered almost exclusively toward the audaciously outré, it’s a totally predictable left turn. His roles, though, can be broadly categorized into buckets of good-weird and bad-weird. This one is the latter.
The Carpenter’s Son
Rated R for strong/bloody violent content and brief nudity. Running Time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters.
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