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Nicolas Cage may be the ideal choice for a bold horror film about the biblical figure, however not for the reasons some viewers could guess. In reality, Cage doesn't actually portray the central religious figure in The Carpenter’s Son: his character is credited only as The Carpenter. The actor is cast as a father figure within this story, striving to maintain his faith as his son (acted by Noah Jupe), his adolescent foster child, begins to display miraculous gifts. The explanation it's hard to envision any other leading star taking this character is that although the figure becomes stricken with numerous difficulties, the actor seems nearly touchingly certain that the murky, bleak little movie is deserving of his effort.

The Actor's Current Film Selections

Nicolas Cage was allocating those years more carefully in recent years. He yet makes more movies than most regular audiences could possibly view — for instance, are you aware that the man has completed several different frontier films over the last few years? — however he also mixes in esteemed independent films like Dream Scenario, another notable movie, and a further title. This new film sounds like one of those, because it’s borderline horror, likely to stir debate, and handles a campy-sounding concept with gravity.

Movie's Storyline and Direction

Unfortunately, writer-director Lotfy Nathan fails to repay the audience's focus. The Carpenter’s Son begins with a interestingly wandering setting, marketed as drawing from an apocryphal lost gospel regarding Christ’s childhood. The Carpenter, the maternal figure, and the boy relocate from place to place, anxious of doctrinal intolerance or doubt regarding The Boy’s strange powers. “Calamity follows us,” Cage gloomily remarks. It goes on as evil influences attack them at their new home, getting a jump-start with that traditional religious challenge for the youth.

Sometimes, this production mirrors an Exorcist-style horror film, but no one of the central roles are directly possessed. Instead, they grow progressively isolated mutually, when these entities affect a local young woman (the actress, listed as “The Stranger”) who the son forms a relationship with, and provides each character unsettling premonitions of a dark tomorrow. The Carpenter in particular grapples with his position in this story, sometimes chastising the boy he can’t fully understand.

Debate and Sensitivity

The content is likely to stir disagreement, and Nathan treats it with a lot of care — overly, perhaps. The idea of a young man facing his future martyrdom and lured by dark influences is certainly scary, but Nathan might be cautious about seeming gratuitous and anxious to telegraph his aims, thus he frequently falls back on darkly ominous filming. Characters brood incessantly — the singer-actress, who displayed notable talent in a recent film update, of all things — yields her role to her Mother Mary cloak, occasionally interrupted by several gruesome scary visuals.

Cage's Performance and Movie's Flaws

Simultaneously, the actor dabbles in just the sort of exaggerated performance that his more snickering appreciators might be looking for. There is a moment (featured) in the trailer where Cage loses control and screams “I’ve lost my faith!” Should such of dramatic explosion is part of a biblical thriller, perhaps a more boldly ridiculous method would take better advantage of the actor's readiness to go over the top if needed. Rather, the film echoes the weaker straight-to-DVD productions the actor filmed during the last decade — not the cheesy thrillers but rather the serious stories and supernatural thrillers that always sound promising, and usually have some select actor's highlights, but in the end seem like, frankly, cheap home video fare.

Truthfully, some of those, although simpler, were more entertaining overall. At this point I need to break my personal rule, not spiritual but career-related: Long ago, a respected mentor convinced me to remove words like “boring” or “dull” from my film-criticism vocabulary. These phrases express scant other than a personal and broadly stated impatience, avoiding the duty of clearly expressing the intellectual and feeling of seeing an individual production. It's hard to communicate boredom without sounding boring personally. It’s no more expressive as terming a movie “notable.” “Explain further,” essentially.

But I must confess, I was bored throughout the film. To the movie’s non-exploitative credit, it is a religious style of dullness, not due to The Carpenter’s Son is preachy, but as it demands a type of dutiful submission to view it. After a while soon after starting, this feature settles into a repetitive rhythm of ongoing suffering, and fails to