The Carpenter's Son

 

The Carpenter’s Son

2025

Director- Lotfy Nathan

Cast- Nicolas Cage, FKA twigs, Noah Jupe, Isla Johnston, Souheila Yacoub

            Biblical horror is a surprisingly tiny genre. Considering that the Bible features infanticide, gang rape, incest, monsters, giants, demons, exorcism, vengeful spirits, cataclysmic disasters, torture, curses, witches and lots and lots of murder, you’d think it would be fruitful ground for horror writers. The Bible is a shocking epic presenting a litany of terrors eclipsing anything Stephen King could write.

            The Carpenter’s Son is inspired by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which follows the childhood of Jesus. In the Gospel, Jesus is shown with out-of-control powers that he hasn’t learned to manage. The timeframe is interesting because, in the minds of a lot of people, Christ exists as one of two things; baby Jesus being born in a manger or adult Jesus dying on a cross.

The idea that Jesus might have been a snotty kid or a rebellious teenager seems offensive to many. A good example of this is the painting “Christ in the House of His Parents” (1850) by Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais. The painting, which features an endearing scene of Mary comforting her son, who has seemingly hurt himself in his father’s workshop, was controversial in its day, so much so that no less than Charles Dickens himself derided the art for its depiction of Jesus as an awkward child.

Having said all of this, The Carpenter’s Son will present to many, a controversial, if not outright offensive story. Pope Gelasius I, in the 5^th century, declared the Infancy Gospel a heresy, so it has a long tradition of offending.

Nicolas Cage plays Joseph, who is at his wits end trying to keep Jesus’ divine nature a secret from all the various people that would do him harm. He is also plagued with doubt as to whether Jesus is in fact divine, or maybe sent from the devil, or maybe not special at all and Joseph sometimes thinks he has been played for a fool. Jesus, on the other hand is starting to develop an idea that he is something special as his powers start to express themselves. He and his father frequently come into conflict as Joseph treats him harshly in an attempt to make him fit in.

In a stroke of brilliant casting, Satan is presented as a kind of delinquent teenage girl, the kind you might see getting into trouble with the bad kids at school and apparently bereft of any parental supervision. Satan keeps tempting Jesus, not with sex or drugs, but tempting him to break rules and to stand up to his father.

Though this sounds like teen drama, its presented with a lot of creepy ambience and scary visuals. We see babies being tossed into a fire (as Herod’s men try to find and kill the prophesied messiah), a shanty town of rotting lepers, a kind of torture compound where all of the suspected sorcerers (i.e. the mentally ill) are beaten, crucified and left to rot, snakes being pulled from people’s mouths during exorcisms, and a vision of Hell. Over all, the film carries a sense of menace and dread throughout.

Its impossible to forget that Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage, so sometimes seeing him is a little jarring (though not nearly as jarring as Harvey Keitel with his thick Brooklyn accent as Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ). But Cage does a good job of conveying the utter sense of frustration and worry that someone would have who is both trying to raise a child and hide a tremendous secret. Think Jim Hopper trying to raise Eleven in Stranger Things and you’ll have a good idea of the feel.

The real genius casting though was of Ilsa Johnston as Satan. Her character goes from friendly, to precocious, to cruel, to sad and makes the character much more relatable than the typical depictions of Satan as a Faustian supervillain.

            Overall , it’s a pretty small scale film that does a lot with very little and enjoyable if you are looking for some out of the ordinary horror viewing.