Starring Nicolas Cage, Noah Jupe, FKA Twigs, Isla Johnston

Directed by Lofty Nathan

Neon – in Cinemas Now

An ageing carpenter in AD 15, struggling with parenthood, has to decide whether his teenage son is the Messiah… or just a very naughty boy.

I might not have bothered with Lofty Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son, however, like most scribblers, especially when wrestling with some intractable ‘writer-for-hire’ gig, I have often dreamed about the project I’d pitch if there were no limits on taste or scared executives to please. Near the top of my list for the last four decades has been a full-on horror movie based on the life of Jesus Christ himself, obviously set in the bits that the bible doesn’t cover. After all, He surely didn’t spend that time inventing the dining table as suggested in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ – although to be fair to Mel, his movie absolutely draws on established horror tropes in visualizing Christ’s final torments. For obvious reasons, it’s not something I have ever brought up at a pitch meeting. ‘Think Smallville, but with Jesus, Satan and added leprosy,’ didn’t strike me as a winning opening line.

Turns out I was just being a coward.

The ingredients are all there, implicit in the Bible itself, a book not short on paranormal genre plot points. A kid with (literally) God-given superpowers enters adolescence and has to learn how to harness his skills for good, while the forces of evil are marshalling to bring him down before he can set up a world religion based on humanity, forgiveness and brotherly love. It turns out, however, that back in the second century AD, an anonymous scribe was first off the block with the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Luckily for writer-director Lofty Nathan, this source material was out of copyright and I have to respect the guy for having the sheer cajones to get it financed, shot and brought to our screens with none other than Nicolas Cage as the Boy Messiah’s long suffering stepdad.

The film itself is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen – at times laugh-out-loud Razzie-worthy, at others haunting, disturbing, affecting and even scary.

Its main hurdle is Mr Cage, who wanders around 1st century Galilee in the manner of a bemused American film star who can’t quite remember why he signed up and attacks every scene in the manner of a melodramatic hostage video, where the captive is forced to rant against his own government. I was also unconvinced by his titular carpentry skills. In one scene, he seemed to be delivering a set of shelves. I couldn’t help thinking that your average Galilean could have knocked those up themself. Having said that, if you need someone to get angry about a toy wooden snake, Nic’s your man. These things aren’t to be messed with. After all, as he tells, young Jesus, ‘I have seen S’taaan!’ Quite why it’s ‘S’taaan’ and not plain old Satan is probably beyond my paygrade.

More successful are the portrayals of Jesus (Noah Jupe) and ‘S’taaan’ itself, manifested as the talented Isla Johnston, a young girl, her face ridged with scars ambiguously suggesting either divine punishment or extreme self-harm. Jupe’s young Christ is remarkably believable. With his tight black curly hair, he makes for a  convincing bundle of adolescent hormones, ogling his sexy mute neighbour, Lilith and (perhaps controversially) flirting with his young virginal mum, played by British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs. The movie’s most interesting scenes explore the charged teenage relationship between Jesus and the elfin, minx-like ‘S’taaan’ as she shows him round the local crucifixion site and tempts him into despairing of humanity’s capacity for cruelty and horror.

Of course when the apprentice Messiah starts performing miracles around the village – involving lepers and demons – well-intentioned though they may be, it gets him into no end of trouble, leading to several full-on domestics with Dad, Cage – at which point we find ourselves incongruously in what plays out like an episode of EastEnders.

The denouement – like the whole movie – is an oddly affecting mix of ludicrous horror melodrama and a genuine attempt to get to the heart of the Christian ethic, and I say that a someone who decided I was an atheist at the age of six.

Verdict: The Carpenter’s Son isn’t a great film – it’s often ridiculous – but neither is it a total turkey. I was certainly never bored and for serious horror nerds it is a bold attempt to explore the genre roots that lie in our Abrahamic traditions. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com