The Carpenter’s Son will be released in theaters on November 14.
The Carpenter’s Son is a religious drama knocking on the door of effective psychological horror. Written and directed by Lotfy Nathan, the period piece is loosely based on the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas (written, as the opening crawl denotes, to retroactively fill in the gaps of Jesus’s life years after his death) and seeks to re-center the oft-ignored Joseph (the legal father of Jesus Christ) in religious myth. The result is a fascinating film of committed performances and violent imagery that hits in occasionally challenging ways, if you can ignore its conservative ideas surrounding modern gender norms.
The characters remain unnamed for the most part. Nicolas Cage plays the eponymous Carpenter, a man plagued by religious visions that take the form of harsh spotlights streaming into darkened spaces, while trip-hop artist FKA Twigs plays his emotionally distant wife, the burdened Mother, and Noah Jupe plays the Boy, a fifteen-year-old whose true nature and significance have been thus far hidden from him. These are, even to the most untrained eye, obvious stand-ins for Joseph, Mary, and a teenage Christ. However, the film doesn’t avoid naming them just to play coy; rather, it understands the power of names and monikers, and reserves these explicit mentions until specific moments of dramatic significance.
In the meantime, the Carpenter takes his family between small villages in the sprawling Roman Empire, ensuring that the Boy remains hidden while the Carpenter and the Mother can successfully teach him the ways of the Talmud (courtesy of local Rabbis who take the teenager under their wings). Beyond that, the Carpenter’s plan remains a mystery even to himself, but he prays desperately and passionately, his hands outstretched and fingers crinkled, as though he were trying to pull divine answers from the ether. Cage delivers a deeply heartfelt performance, as a father completely lost when it comes to raising his son, modulating his signature outbursts for a story of tremendous significance. Both he and the Boy are plagued with visions of the future, and the emotional effect this has on them is one of the movie’s central elements amidst its soundscape of harsh whispers and the frequent serpent imagery that injects eeriness into every other scene.
As the family, believing themselves to be persecuted, stops by their umpteenth village, the Carpenter takes a job sculpting pagan temple idols. Before long, a mysterious, androgynous child dubbed “the Stranger” (Isla Johnston) begins tempting the Boy in unusual ways. That this character appears shortly after the Carpenter teaches him about Satan is a crystal-clear tell, but the Stranger exhibits more shades of gray than one might expect. In fact, although she starts out impish, she eventually urges the Boy to use his abilities to heal people, exposing himself to the world in the process.
The drama therein allows Jupe to play a fascinating version of the young Christ: He’s angsty and sharp-tongued, albeit slightly less so than in the actual Infancy Gospel. When challenged to introspect about his true nature, the character begins to slowly unravel the more he understands his purpose – a doctrine he learns not through divine intervention, but by observing suffering up close. The Carpenter’s Son is filled with images of sickness and state torture, ideas that would eventually become key to biblical stories, but presented here at their most disturbing. If Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was about feeling Jesus’ physical suffering, then The Carpenter’s Son is geared more towards understanding the tremendous emotional burden placed upon him.
If the film has a major weak point, it’s Twigs’ glassy-eyed Mother, who can’t help but feel like a distracting fixture of the backdrop. Although the actress bursts to life when her character is finally granted an impassioned monologue or two, she tends to sap the energy out of a scene. Thankfully, she isn’t nearly as major a part of the story as Joseph, the Boy, or even the Stranger, the latter of whom becomes a surprising emotional centerpiece thanks to Johnston’s troubled performance as a character not only labelled “evil,” but one who questions the very religious binaries that would lead to her being canonized in this way.
Unfortunately, the various forms the Stranger takes – her two human avatars in particular – seem ill-thought out at best, given how they both center on the character’s androgyny. Intentionally or otherwise, ambiguous clothing and hair, and even breast-binding, become symbols of horror and evil, speaking to the conservative trans panic that has taken hold among American evangelicalism this past decade. In a film about subverting religious norms to come to a greater understanding of scripture and allegory, this distinctly backward framing is hard to ignore.
That said, The Carpenter’s Son remains an effective piece of genre cinema, one whose primary aesthetic is less a midnight movie and more a straightforward historical drama despite its ethereal happenings. Any time that Jupe becomes the frame’s focus, cinematographer Simon Beaufils’ camera takes on an intimate, almost introspective quality buoyed by a naturalistic palette and soft focus. However, there are plenty of jolting delights to be found in the film’s occasional body horror, Cage’s emotional shimmies toward unhinged furor, and even some expressionistic flourishes that turn the environment blood-red and oppressive when the story nears its climax. It may not be likely to change one’s entire outlook on faith, but when it comes to introducing tactile new dimensions that might lead to a closer analysis of the stories one holds dear, it’s a damn fine bit of filmmaking.
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