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The acclaimed actor is likely the optimal selection for a audacious horror film centered on Jesus Christ, however not for the motivations many viewers could guess. In reality, Cage does not even act as Jesus in The Carpenter’s Son: the part he plays is credited merely as The Carpenter. Cage is cast as the Joseph in this tale, attempting to maintain his faith while his son (played by Noah Jupe), their now-teenage adopted son, begins to display supernatural abilities. The reason it's challenging to picture another prominent performer playing this part is that while the figure becomes weighed down with various challenges, the actor seems practically touchingly certain that the murky, somber feature is a valuable project.

The Actor's Current Projects

Nicolas Cage has allocating his time more carefully lately. He continues to makes more films than most regular audiences could possibly view — as an illustration, are you aware that the actor has made three different cowboy movies recently? — but he also adds prestige A24/Neon gigs for example Dream Scenario, Pig, and Longlegs. This new film appears to be a similar project, in that it’s genre-adjacent, likely to stir debate, and takes a campy-sounding concept quite seriously.

Movie's Plot and Execution

Sadly, filmmaker Lotfy Nathan does not reward viewer engagement. The Carpenter’s Son begins with a engagingly rootless place, marketed as drawing from an obscure religious text concerning the youthful days of the messiah. The Carpenter, The Mother, and the boy move constantly, fearful of doctrinal intolerance or distrust about their son's strange powers. “Disaster trails us,” Cage mournfully notes. It goes on as dark forces attack the household in their latest settlement, beginning on the well-known scriptural test for The Boy.

Sometimes, the movie mirrors an Exorcist-style possession movie, but no one of the main figures are clearly inhabited. Rather, they become progressively isolated from one another, when these entities affect a nearby girl (the actress, credited as “The Stranger”) who The Boy forms a relationship with, and presents each character troubling visions of a dark tomorrow. Cage's role in particular struggles with his position within the plot, at times berating the boy he doesn't completely grasp.

Debate and Caution

The content is apt to stir disagreement, and the director approaches it with a lot of care — excessive, maybe. The notion of a young man dealing with his future martyrdom and lured by mysterious forces is truly terrifying, but the filmmaker might be cautious about seeming gratuitous and keen to signal his goals, so he often retreats into gloomily threatening visuals. The roles constantly ponder — FKA Twigs, who showed notable talent in the 2024 Crow remake, interestingly — surrenders her acting to her character's costume, sometimes broken up by several disturbing frightening scenes.

The Star's Performance and Film's Shortcomings

Meanwhile, Cage toy with exactly the kind of overacting that his more snickering appreciators might be looking for. An instance (featured) in promotional material where Cage erupts and shouts “My belief is broken!” When this sort of theatrical release is included in your Jesus-themed horror movie, maybe a more brazenly silly style would take better advantage of the actor's readiness to be extreme when necessary. Rather, the film more closely resembles the poorer low-budget films he starred in through much of the last decade — not the cheesy thrillers instead the narrative films and ghost stories that always sound promising, and frequently include a few choice Cage moments, but ultimately feel like, well, low-budget DTV material.

Honestly, some of those, although simpler, were more watchable in general. Here is where I need to break my usual practice, not spiritual but work-oriented: Long ago, a respected mentor persuaded me to eliminate adjectives like “tedious” or “uninteresting” from my analytical lexicon. These words express scant other than a subjective and generically described impatience, disengaging from the duty of clearly expressing the intellectual and feeling of watching a particular movie. It's hard to communicate monotony without seeming uninteresting oneself. It's just as unclear as labeling a movie “engaging.” “Elaborate,” essentially.

But I must confess, I was bored during much of The Carpenter’s Son. On the positive side, it’s a devotional type of boredom, not because The Carpenter’s Son is moralizing, but since it takes a type of dutiful submission to sit through it. At some point early on, the movie settles into a repetitive rhythm of simmering anguish, and fails to