When the trailer was first released for Lofty Nathan’s Biblical horror film The Carpenter’s Son, there was some understandable trepidation from all sides. For a more conservative audience, there was worry that the film would present a blasphemous take on Christ that would turn him into something monstrous. For an audience perhaps more comfortable with its source material – the apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” – well, the worry was much the same. A challenging text where a petulant young Christ defiantly rebukes his elders and kills his peers with little hesitation or remorse, it is not hard to imagine why the church would be averse to portraying a perfect Savior in such a problematically human light. I wondered whether this film would find Christ going full Brightburn – an impossibly powerful being fed up with the sinfulness of man who might think terror was a better option than love. What I found, however, was a film that was far more faithful to the spirit of the tradition and, even in its more horrific moments, far more gentle with how terrifying it must have been to be a young God confronted with the wanton cruelty of his creation.
The film opens just after the birth of Christ, finding The Carpenter/Joseph (Nic Cage) stealthily leading The Mother/Mary (FKA Twigs) as they evade Herod’s infamous Slaughter of the Innocents. Perhaps taking inspiration from Darren Aronofsky’s own divisive Biblical morality tale, Mother, this scene effectively sets the tone for the film’s unflinching approach to human cruelty (be forewarned). After this, we jump forward to find that The Boy/Jesus (Noah Jupe) is a young teenager, his family perpetually ready to flee should his supernatural powers be discovered.
The heart of the film, however, lies in the fact that not even The Boy understands what these powers are and, like any awkward teenager aching to discover themselves, must wrestle with his true nature. Caught between his stepfather’s rigid righteousness and the sensual temptation of The Stranger/Satan (Isla Johnston), The Boy must decide for himself how he will approach humanity’s suffering – with indignation or with mercy.
If you’re familiar with the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” you may be asking yourself whether The Boy ever makes clay pigeons and throws his classmates off rooftops – perhaps luckily for everyone, he does not. Although there is a scene where The Boy appears to harm someone out of fear, the text’s influence is more in terms of pondering what it must have been like to grow up fully human with all of its errant passions and moral ambiguity while simultaneously knowing that you are the Holy source of all creation. Jupe plays Christ with a desperation that really gives you a sense of his humanity – clearly he’s made for something more, but at every turn he’s wary that he might be swallowed up by the unknown forces that surround him.
To frame this, the film wields Cage’s explosive screen presence to great effect, portraying Joseph as a man torn between the absolute certainty of his Jewish tradition and the doubt that has creeped in around the miraculous birth – is God instructing him to raise this child in the faith, is God doing a new thing entirely, or does God have any part in this at all? In many ways, it portrays his internal struggle as a prolonged debate about whether man was made for the Sabbath or the Sabbath for man as he wrestles with The Boy’s awkward steps towards independence. The Carpenter’s faith (or lack thereof) is contextualized by FKA Twigs other worldly serenity as The Mother, played for most of the film with a silent remove and little warmth. While it is welcomed to not see her portrayed as some saccharine saint, this quiet sturdiness is at times awkward against Cage’s intensity until an affecting moment where The Mother is allowed to cry out with a defense of her faith. Perhaps the movie’s greatest weakness is only allowing Mary this one moment to add her voice to The Boy’s raising.
This is forgiven, however, because Joseph’s desperate orthodoxy finds a fascinating juxtaposition in the gnostic angst of The Stranger who comes in the form of a young girl. Played with a simmering fierceness by Johnston, this portrayal of Satan strikes a great balance between a once proud prince of heaven and a lonely, wounded child. The Stranger, rather than The Carpenter, is the one who leads Christ out amongst the sick and the damned, forcing him to see the suffering of this world. Joseph’s holiness would protect The Boy from it, Satan’s anger would rub it in his face – Christ wrestles to find a way to bridge the two. But the Gnosticism of The Stranger is what really sells it – this flesh is a prison for Satan but Christ’s mission is one to redeem even our sinful flesh. The choice to make The Stranger a child around The Boy’s age plays a bit on youthful sexual tension without overstating it, making the struggle human – and uncomfortably so.
Another way brilliant way the film sells this tension is by setting it in at the edge of everything, in a landscape both familiar to all Biblical films and yet unnervingly nowhere at all. While you see elements of Second Temple Judaism, you never get a sense of the pageantry other films relish in, and while there are elements of Rome, it is populated only by the most forgotten of soldiers. Instead, you get a village filled with poverty, disease, and capital punishment where neighbors seem to be entirely focused on their own scrounging. This is the town The Carpenter would hide The Boy in, this is the mess that The Stranger won’t let him escape.
Perhaps you’re wondering whether this is actually a horror movie at all and, to be fair, I’m not sure it is unless you’re willing to see the world through its earnestly spiritual lens. Like the best religious art, this film asks the very questions that Scripture confronts us with time and time again – how horrific is it for you to look at the suffering of the world, to be tempted to look away and ignore it? But perhaps more interesting than that, the film presents a story of how terrible it must have been for Christ to witness the horror of humanity and, as he grew into himself, recognize that he would have to die in order to hold a mirror up to it. How terrifying it is, after all, to choose Love.