Crew
Director/Screenplay – Lofty Nathan, Producers – Nicolas Cage, Alex Hughes, Eugene Kotlyarenko, Riccardo Maddalosso, Julie Viez, Photography – Simon Beaufils, Music – Lorenz Dabgel, Additional Music – Peter Hinderthür, Visual Effects Supervisor – Hugues Namur, Visual Effects – MPC, Special Effects Supervisor – Sefian Bensalem, Makeup Effects – Prokopis Vlasseros & Maria Staikou, Production Design – Jean Vincent Puzos. Production Company – Spacemaker/Cinenovo/Saturn Films/Anonymous Content/Curious Gremlin/Wrong Men/The Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government/BNP Paribas Fortis Film Finance/Goodfellas/Le Pacte.
Cast
Noah Jupe (The Boy), Nicolas Cage (The Carpenter), FKA Twigs (The Mother), Isla Johnston (The Stranger), Soheila Yacoub (Lilith), Oretsis Paliadelis (The Teacher)
Plot
A Jewish carpenter, his wife and eleven-year-old son flee into Egypt and set up home. The boy befriends a girl who then pushes him, making him fall onto a leper. Afterwards, the boy finds the leper has been miraculously healed. The boy tries to understand his nature. He finds that he can restore life and is able to drive a demon from a possessed woman. However, the locals react in fear to this and accuse the boy of sorcery.
The Carpenter’s Son caught my attention where it was being promoted as a horror movie about the life of Jesus. This has a bizarre kind of freakshow appeal that meant I had to see it. The actuality of such is quite different, which I will get to below. This mired the film in controversy – location shooting was refused in Egypt and so the production moved to Greece, while the film was banned outright in the Philippines.
The depiction of the life of Jesus on screen in anything other than an orthodox context is always something that courts controversy. I was in school and remember reading about the uproar that occurred when Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979) came out and a few years later witnessed firsthand the one that accrued around Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Dennis Potter’s tv play Son of Man (1969), a telling of the last days of Jesus, accrued controversy when it aired on the BBC. Surprisingly, Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter (2001) came and went without a blip, while Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which elevated his last days to the level of Torture Porn but was otherwise orthodox, was brought wholesale by the establishment. It would be my dream someday to conduct a film adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man (1966).
The Carpenter’s Son comes from Lofty Nathan who was Egyptian-born but British raised. He had previously directed the documentary 12 O’Clock Boys (2013) and the drama Harqah (2022). Nathan comes from a Coptic Christian background and bases The Carpenter’s Son on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a fragmentary work dating from around the 1st-2nd Centuries A.D.. This is one of the Biblical Apocrypha, works that were dismissed by the official assemblers of the Bible as either unreliable or heretical. It tells the story of several events from Jesus’s childhood between ages five and twelve where to all intents he was a vengeful little prick, striking neighbours blind and cursing several other children dead, in between assorted miracles. For all that, Nathan does not adapt these particularly closely and mostly makes up his own story – there is no encounters with The Devil nor deliverances from possession in the Infancy Gospel, for instance.
The whole horror pitch serves to get your certain attention – and certainly gets this site taking a look at The Carpenter’s Son, which I would have done in the normal course of events. The disappointment is that we never get the Jesus horror movie that The Carpenter’s Son promises to be. Take this away and what we have could be no more than a regular work speculating about the childhood of Jesus. It is certainly a film made with a belief in his divinity and never questions this. Nor is there anything particularly blasphemous in its take on this. There is another whole taxonomy of film and tv that exists almost unnoticed outside of mainstream film and tv that caters to Christian audiences. As such, The Carpenter’s Son has the look and pseudo-historical texture of a show like The Chosen (2017- ). (I did have some quibbles with the pseudo-historical aspect such as Nicolas Cage talking in King James English “Whence did he come?” and the like).
The horror element is negligible. A couple of lepers, a snake bite and a scene where the young Jesus delivers a possessed woman, which appears to consist of he reaching inside her mouth and pulling out an obvious CGI looking snake. Actually, the most interesting aspect is not the vague horror elements but the portrayal of The Devil as a child – Isla Johnston, who gives a series of ambiguous expressions as she alternately befriends and provokes the young Jesus. But in truth there is little about The Carpenter’s Son of interest, either as the blasphemous work it seeks to label itself as or as a traditional work either.
Among the rest of the cast, FKA Twigs is not much of an actress and fails to make any real distinction as Mary. Nicolas Cage has become the patron saint of weird movies in the last few years. (The film almost seems to be Cage making up for his casting in Left Behind (2014), a work that had both feet implanted in the evangelical Christian camp). Cage gives a largely subdued performance but rises to give the good old Cage bad acting barnstormer during one a scene where he chews Twigs out and loses his shit in the good old Cage way.
Trailer here