<\/p>\n
A hopelessly inert religious horror film based on the apocryphal \u201cInfancy Gospel of Thomas\u201d (as opposed to the four canonical gospels of The New Testament, which are obviously all composed of nothing but hard facts), Lotfy Nathan\u2019s<\/a> \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d begins with a premise so crystalline that even a skeptical heathen like me can appreciate its truth: It would have been absolutely terrifying if the son of God suddenly rocked up on this mortal coil. Beautiful, too, at times, but also terrifying. For everyone.<\/p>\n For his Mother (FKA Twigs, her power as an artist wasted in a movie that only wants her for her pout), whose steadfast faith in her infant provenance only makes her more afraid of the baby-burning pagans on the highway outside of town. For his Father (Nicolas Cage<\/a>), a haunted and high-strung craftsman who can\u2019t shake the suspicion that his son might have been sent from below rather than above. For the Boy himself (Noah Jupe<\/a>, his character unnamed for copyright reasons), whose ability to heal lepers, bring the dead back to life, and \u2014\u00a0more nefariously \u2014\u00a0kill people just by looking at them adds an extra dimension to the anxieties of puberty. And for everyone else in the sad Galilean village where Jesus the Boy and his family have most recently taken refuge from the devil in 15 A.D., uneducated idol-worshippers who can\u2019t understand why their local marketplace has become ground zero in the fight over humanity\u2019s future.<\/p>\n More from IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n The only people for whom this situation isn\u2019t terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing but the purgatorial torpor of sitting through a movie that\u2019s too afraid of its own concept to do anything truly provocative with it.<\/p>\n Raised in the Coptic Orthodox Christian church, Nathan (\u201c12 O\u2019Clock Boys,\u201d \u201cHarka\u201d) came to the project with an inchoate fascination with the marginalia of that theology, and found that Jesus\u2019 formative years would be ripe material for the ultimate crisis of faith. As the Infancy Gospel of Thomas would have it, the Boy was never more relatable than he was as a horny adolescent who\u2019s starting to feel like his father is the most oppressive force on earth; as a sullen and moppy teenager who\u2019s coming into his full power, and naturally finds himself more compelled by the evil forces that encourage him to use it than he is by his parents who tell him to hide it away.<\/p>\n Will the Boy find the resolve to sacrifice himself for our sins? Or will he be seduced by the Stranger (a scarred and scowling Isla Johnston as the personification of all darkness, her tremulous conviction making it easy to understand why Baz Luhrmann cast her in the lead role of his Joan of Arc epic), who whispers into his ear, \u201cYou will die for miserable people, and you will not be thanked\u201d? Spoiler alert: Christianity has since become a very popular religion.<\/p>\n But if this story of how generic-brand Jesus came to see himself on the cross is understandably more about the journey than the destination, \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d finds itself at an immediate loss as to how it could meaningfully texture that path. The essence of Nathan\u2019s approach is to approximate how difficult it must have been for ancient peoples to maintain their faith in a world of darkness \u2014\u00a0a world desperate for even the faintest traces of divine light. It\u2019s an approach that leads the filmmaker to steep this story in an impenetrable air of miserablism; joyless, without shape, and no more textured than the sound of a dull ringing in your ears.<\/p>\n Paranoid before it turns petulant, Cage\u2019s performance eventually gives way to the high rising terminal that has always been his fallback plan in the absence of a real character to play (\u201cMy faith has been SHAAAATTTEREEDD because of you!\u201d is the closest he gets to a memorable line delivery here), but his somnambulant opening voiceover sets the tone for the brooding sluggishness of the film to come. \u201cHe bears a power he cannot understand,\u201d the Carpenter says of his son as they trudge through the desert in search of a new place to hide.\u00a0\u201cA power I cannot contain. Calamity follows us.\u201d That calamity is, of course, \u201cSe-TAHN,\u201d who creeps around these characters in the shadows, Simon Beaufils\u2019 rugged but drearily underlit 35mm cinematography offering \u201cthe Stranger\u201d plenty of places to hide.<\/p>\n For the most part, however, the Stranger waltzes around in plain sight, adopting the form of an androgynous teen \u2014 their scarred face betraying the wounds of Heaven\u2019s rejection \u2014 who baits the Boy into indulging his darkest impulses. So what if he sneaks a peek at the beautiful, non-verbal neighbor girl as she showers outside of her house? Who cares if he takes an unholy measure of revenge against the mean-spirited Torah teacher who\u2019s spiteful towards his strange wisdom? These people will crucify him the first chance they get. Might as well spike their food with scorpion venom.<\/p>\n Nathan devotes the brunt of his attention to the torment of a world that has every reason to doubt the mercy of a divine creator. Though he displays a half-developed knack for visiting certain frights upon his victims (the scene in which Lillith is pulled out of her bed with a silent scream is particularly effective), his ambivalence toward embracing the language of a horror film holds \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d back from channeling the holy terror needed to combat its listless approach to characterization. Too heightened to take at face value and too rote to add a lastingly visceral element to this most famous of myths, the scares grow tedious faster than a bad church sermon. (There are only so many times you can watch someone gag on a computer-generated serpent.)<\/p>\n There\u2019s a hint of Luciferean menace to some of the movie\u2019s hellacious imagery (e.g., a hole in the ground revealed to be composed of 1,000 writhing bodies), but nothing Nathan cooks up is even half as unnerving as the reality of the Boy\u2019s zealots. It makes sense: If you heal a leper with your touch, he\u2019s probably gonna show up at your house in the middle of the night hoping for another miracle. But how the desperation of \u201cthe unclean\u201d lands on the Boy is hard to parse, as Nathan\u2019s script mistakes droning ambiance for psychological insight, and Jupe\u2019s performance \u2014 all roiling teen angst topped with a mop of perfectly angelic curls \u2014\u00a0is powerless to turn whatever into fine.<\/p>\n Split between probing the Boy\u2019s inner turmoil and testing the Carpenter\u2019s resolve, the movie never finds a compelling way to play one against the other. While there\u2019s a consciously universal quality to all of the father-son bickering that pushes these characters towards the extremes of their beliefs, neither arc is fleshed out enough to carve anything worth keeping from their spiritual battle of wills (a battle that pales in comparison to the tortured stalemate of Johnston\u2019s performance, which rages with agonized hate). At its best, \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d feels like a stolid cross between \u201cLast Days in the Desert\u201d and \u201cBrightburn\u201d \u2014 flat, empty, and threatened by the unformed potential of a god\u2019s raw power.<\/p>\n More often, however, the film is as lost and miserable as any of the people in it. Nathan inevitably stumbles upon an answer that tries to make sense of their anguish, but he doesn\u2019t seem to have any real faith in its meaning. He\u2019s as incapable of articulating the Boy\u2019s power as the Carpenter is at containing it, and so \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d never escapes the sacred context of its subject, nor the sense of calamity that seems to follow him wherever he goes.<\/p>\n Magnolia will release \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d in theaters on Friday, November 14.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n Best of IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Indiewire’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A hopelessly inert religious horror film based on the apocryphal \u201cInfancy Gospel of Thomas\u201d (as opposed to the four canonical gospels of The New Testament, which are obviously all composed of nothing but hard facts), Lotfy Nathan\u2019s \u201cThe Carpenter\u2019s Son\u201d begins with a premise so crystalline that even a skeptical heathen like me can appreciate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2155069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[412343,329323,412342,357008,351853,343482,412577,412578],"class_list":["post-2155068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-canonical-gospels","tag-horror-film","tag-infancy-gospel-of-thomas","tag-lotfy-nathan","tag-nicolas-cage","tag-noah-jupe","tag-the-carpenter","tag-the-new-testament"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\u2018The-Carpenters-Son-Review-Nicolas-Cage-Plays-Jesus-Stepfather-in.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2155068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2155070,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155068\/revisions\/2155070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2155069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2155068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2155068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2155068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: C-<\/h2>\n