It’s hard to know how seriously one should take a film that casts Nicolas Cage as Joseph, the carpenter who acted as the adoptive father of Jesus. One might expect, with the actor still relying on his trademark California intonation and histrionic outbursts, that this would be another one of his late-stage career larks, like playing Dracula or himself. But in The Carpenter’s Son, a bafflingly serious stew of horror, drama and fantasy, it slowly starts to dawn on us that this is in fact, not a joke. What it is I couldn’t tell you but entertaining it most definitely isn’t.
The film, from Egypt-born, London-raised writer and director Lotfy Nathan, is inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a text seen as heretical by some, which offers highly debated “insight” into the early years of Jesus. Nathan begins by clueing us into the fact that this isn’t your vicar’s Sunday school biblical drama, as a screaming cave-based birth sequence is followed by a bonfire of babies, King Herod’s men throwing on more and more as mothers wail at the side. Cage’s unnamed carpenter and the new mother at his side (FKA twigs) escape and we leap forward to see them moving into a remote village with their teenage offspring, known as the boy (Noah Jupe).
There’s the tease of a better film here, the idea of following Jesus as an unusually gifted boy trying to find his way and understand his place in a world of conflicting forces providing an interesting dramatic tension. His father is joyless and devout, fasting to show his devotion and shutting any light (and views of hot neighbours showering next door) out of the house. The townspeople are suspicious and unfriendly except one strange and lonely girl eager for someone to play with.
It doesn’t take long to figure out who and what the girl is (spoiler: it’s not good) but it takes a little longer to understand what Nathan is trying to do with his reframing of a familiar tale. Is it a supernatural coming-of-age story? Is it a balls-to-the-wall gonzo horror? Is it a superhero origins tale? Is it socio-political commentary on the hurdles faced by a figure of undeniable good? The answer is yes to all but no to whether that all works together. The film a messy and atonal, if mercifully short, waste of eye-catching locations (it was all shot in rural parts of Greece).
The beautiful scenery is about all Nathan can safely rely upon to impress us with his devilish imagery proving to be nasty yet entirely unscary. Far scarier is his rushed storytelling, the film escalating at a rather confusing pace, as if he was forced last minute to chop it up into bits and frantically stitch it back together (not that I would want to see the longer version but it surely exists somewhere). He’s even less sure of what to do with his cast who all seem to be acting in differently awful movies. FKA twigs is as stiff and unconvincing as she was in last year’s dreadful remake of The Crow and while Jupe emerges mostly scratch-free (it’s all merely thankless for him rather than actively embarrassing), Cage is predictably miscast. His performance is stuck between the more effective, muted work he gave in recent films like Pig and Dream Scenario and him at his fanboy-pleasing midnight movie worst, going over the top because no one seems able to stop him. He’s as poorly modulated as the film around him, which never explodes into full horror but doesn’t have the emotional pull to be a drama of any real power, languishing somewhere in the middle instead.
It’s all so hard to define not because it’s too brave and original to fit into the system, but because it’s never all that clear that anyone involved knows what the hell they’re making. Whatever their answers might be, I’m positive that Nathan and Cage didn’t aim to deliver something quite so dull.
