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Nicolas Cage could be the perfect choice for a audacious horror film focused on the biblical figure, though not for the motivations some audiences could guess. Actually, the star does not even act as the central religious figure in The Carpenter’s Son: the part he plays is referred to merely as The Carpenter. The actor is cast as the Joseph within this story, attempting to maintain his religious convictions while the teenage character (acted by the young actor), his teenage adopted son, commences to display supernatural abilities. The explanation it's hard to picture another leading star playing this part is that while the figure is weighed down with multiple difficulties, Cage himself appears almost touchingly convinced that this murky, grim small film is a valuable project.

The Actor's Recent Projects

Cage has been allocating his time more carefully lately. He still makes additional projects than the majority of regular audiences may ever watch — for instance, were you informed that he has completed a trio of different Westerns recently? — but he also includes high-profile critically acclaimed roles such as Dream Scenario, another notable movie, and Longlegs. This new film appears to be a similar project, because it’s not strictly scary, potentially provocative, and takes a over-the-top premise quite seriously.

Movie's Premise and Direction

Unfortunately, filmmaker Lotfy Nathan does not justify that serious attention. The Carpenter’s Son starts from a interestingly wandering context, presented as drawing from an unknown scripture regarding Christ’s childhood. Cage's character, The Mother, and their son move from place to place, anxious of religious persecution or doubt regarding The Boy’s strange powers. “Calamity follows us,” The Carpenter gloomily remarks. This persists as sinister entities attack the family in their latest settlement, beginning on the traditional religious challenge for the youth.

Occasionally, the movie mirrors an demonic possession-type possession movie, except that none of the main figures are clearly inhabited. On the contrary, they become more and more distant from one another, when these entities affect a resident female (the actress, listed as “The Stranger”) who The Boy forms a relationship with, and gives each character disturbing images of a bleak destiny. Cage's role in particular fights with his role in the narrative, at times chastising his child he doesn't completely grasp.

Debate and Care

The content is prone to invite debate, and Nathan approaches it with a lot of sensitivity — too much, maybe. The notion of a young man dealing with his future martyrdom and lured by mysterious forces is indeed terrifying, but Nathan may be hesitant regarding looking exploitative and keen to telegraph his intentions, so he often falls back on dimly foreboding filming. Characters constantly ponder — the singer-actress, who showed genuine potential in another movie, surprisingly — surrenders her performance to her Mother Mary cloak, sometimes broken up by some disturbing frightening scenes.

The Star's Performance and Movie's Weaknesses

Simultaneously, the actor toy with exactly the kind of overacting that his more snickering appreciators may desire. There is a moment (also included) in previews where Cage flips out and shouts “My belief is broken!” If that kind of florid outburst is included in your religious scary film, possibly a more brazenly silly style would make better use of Cage’s willingness to go over the top as required. Instead, The Carpenter’s Son more closely resembles the poorer straight-to-DVD films the actor filmed during the 2010s — apart from the B-movies so much as the dramas and supernatural thrillers that typically appear interesting, and often contain several notable Cage moments, but ultimately feel like, well, low-budget DTV material.

Honestly, some of those, though not as grand, were easier to view in general. Here is where I need to break my own dogma, not faith-based but professional: Years back, an admired senior persuaded me to remove descriptive terms like “boring” or “dull” from my reviewing language. Such terms convey little other than a individual and broadly stated impatience, disengaging from the task of vividly conveying the mental and feeling of viewing a specific film. It's challenging to express monotony without sounding boring yourself. It’s no more expressive as labeling a movie “notable.” “Say more,” in other words.

However, I admit, I felt uninterested throughout the film. To the movie’s non-exploitative credit, it is a religious style of dullness, not for The Carpenter’s Son is moralizing, but since it takes a type of dutiful submission to watch it. At some point soon after starting, this feature locks into a cyclic tempo of simmering anguish, and fails to