When recently asked about Nicolas Cage’s desire to work with him, Robert Eggers stated that he would find it a challenge to fit the actor, given his intense aura of “modernity,” into the period works that the Nosferatu director is devoted to making. With that in mind, Cage’s performance in writer-director Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son, a biblical fantasy whose dreary, static solemnity certainly bears echoes of Eggers’s work, could be seen as something of a stealth audition. But it’s difficult to imagine Cage’s subdued role within it making much of an impression on either his industry peers or his rabid fanbase.
Inspired by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Nathan’s film follows an adolescent Jesus (Noah Jupe) as he travels through the Roman Egypt desert with his mother, Mary (FKA twigs), and father, Joseph (Cage). Going to great lengths to hide their identities, the family takes refuge in a rural village, and it’s there that Jesus’s powers begin to manifest, much to the interest of their new neighbors. He also begins a tentative dalliance with a mysterious and mischievous girl (Isla Johnston) of the same age, who encourages the boy’s powers for dubious ends. As soon as Jesus begins to exhibit aggressive and vindictive behavior, it becomes clear that his manipulative new playmate is none other than the embodiment of Satan.
Nathan, who began his career in documentary with the evocative community portrait 12 O’Clock Boys, initially seems to aspire to the verité quality of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, or even Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, with Simon Beaufils’s camera traversing the desert landscapes and the figures that populate them with vivid immediacy. Any attempt at serious theological inquiry, though, soon becomes subsumed in a host of chintzy supernatural shenanigans that turn Nathan’s film into an all-too-familiar “elevated horror” extravaganza. But The Carpenter’s Son fails to even offer decent frights, unless one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes particularly scary.
Narratively, the film takes the form of a simplistic coming-of-age story, with the young Jesus’s rebellion against Joseph’s strict mentorship positioned as a heightened show of typical teenage angst. Jupe signifies his internal conflict by stomping around with a furrowed brow, which remains unwavering whether he’s marvelling at bringing a dead cricket back to life or throwing demon-influenced temper tantrums when he begins to discover the truth of his holy origins. Meanwhile, as Mary, twigs is confined to sitting silently on the sidelines, an immaculate object whose sole purpose is to flash expressions of vague concern at the proceedings.
As for Cage, his performance is unusually muted, perhaps to keep in line with the strained seriousness of The Carpenter’s Son. But considering that the film does eventually devolve into the sort of B-movie hokum that the actor has so often gleefully attached himself to, it’s disappointing to witness the degree to which he’s allowed himself to be reined in. Reportedly, Cage was attacked by bees at one point during the film’s harsh shoot, which brings to mind his iconic camp turn in Neil LaBute’s remake of The Wicker Man. Had The Carpenter’s Son possessed the anything-goes energy of that film, then it may have been able to breathe some fresh life into its source material, rather than feel so maddeningly stuck in the mud.
Score:
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs, Isla Johnston, Souheila Yacoub Director: Lotfy Nathan Screenwriter: Lotfy Nathan Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 94 min Rating: R Year: 2025
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