Review: The Carpenter’s Son

I only ended up seeing The Carpenter’s Son because a man at my gym, who has been trying to convert me for over two decades, handed me a free ticket he didn’t want. He admitted he probably shouldn’t see it himself, which in my world counts as a glowing endorsement.

By the time I learned the film had been review-bombed across Google and IMDb, accused of blasphemy, and that director Lotfy Nathan received his first death threat from self-appointed Christian defenders, I was all in. As Nathan himself put it in an interview, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” A sentiment, unfortunately, many of his critics don’t seem to share.

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The premise, a Biblical horror film exploring Jesus’s adolescence, is apparently treated by some as shocking. To me, that simply confirms they’ve never read the Bible, a text overflowing with violence, terror, divine wrath, and supernatural threat. The film draws loosely from a non-canonical source, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text rejected by early Christian leaders for its late authorship and its Gnostic leanings. The other Gospel is a collection of 114 sayings emphasizing secret knowledge, inward revelation, and salvation through self-understanding rather than physical resurrection. For mainline Christianity, neither was, nor still is, acceptable if not heretical.

Again, all signs are pointing to something interesting. I’m a horror fan, and blasphemy just adds that je ne sais quoi.

The film imagines Jesus as a gifted, strange, overwhelmed child on the cusp of adulthood. There is a better movie buried in Nathan’s concept: the idea of an adolescent Jesus trying to understand his place in a hostile, liminal, spiritual world. Full of power he doesn’t yet comprehend, the movie could have carried an extraordinary coming-of-age story, if not derivative, to films like Dune.

Occasionally, the movie brushes against that possibility, especially in its portrayal of Joseph’s fear and rigidity. Joseph, played by Nicolas Cage with a kind of sedated earnestness, is a man hollowed out by devotion, fasting constantly, closing the house to sunlight (and to the teenage boy’s view of the bathing neighbor next door), and trying desperately to contain forces far beyond him.

Mary (FKA Twigs) is gentler, though equally secretive. The townspeople are suspicious and unfriendly, with the exception of one lonely girl who wants a friend. Jesus, now fifteen and acted with a convincingly bored adolescent grimness by Noah Jupe, deals with the mundane struggles of youth while also suffering visions of crucifixion and sensing truths about himself that no one can explain.

For viewers familiar with magical initiation stories, the structure feels oddly familiar. This is the story of every young Witch learning their power: the push-pull between fear and calling, the reckoning with liminal spaces, and the decision of how much energy and how much responsibility one is willing to wield. The film could have leaned more boldly into that mysticism, or at least embraced the inherent emotional terror of a boy realizing he is both human and divine.

Instead, what should have been a rich, unnerving mythic tale becomes sluggish and strangely inert. The pacing is glacial. I genuinely caught myself wondering whether physicists had ever studied the mathematics of popcorn shapes. (Spoiler alert!  They have. Just Google it.) Scenes linger too long without emotional payoff; the horror is rudimentary if not cliché, and the film’s monotony undercuts its ambition.

Visually, the film rarely rises above drab. Flat locations, a muted and seemingly accidental color palette, and even the gore, snakes yanked from mouths and sudden splashes of violence, feel so uninspired that one wonders where Satan’s creativity has gone.

There was a score.  I don’t remember it, sounds of surprise, and occasionally loud for emphasis.

There are moments, though, when its central concept breaks through. Nathan captures something real in the fundamental terror of having a potentially divine being living next door could be equal parts awe-inspiring and horrifying, potentially might reframe the usual neighborly complaints about noise or landscaping. And the dynamic between Joseph and Jesus, shaped by fear, secrecy, and unspoken destiny, is occasionally and genuinely compelling.

But these sparks aren’t enough to ignite the whole. Even the film’s invented antagonist—a mysterious child who tempts Jesus, clearly meant to be Satan, feels more like a philosophical exercise than a menace. The narrative drifts toward a confrontation that should have felt mythic, but instead lands as ordinary, much like washing dishes after dinner.

Ironically, despite the accusations of blasphemy, The Carpenter’s Son is far less controversial than its detractors claim. It isn’t sacrilegious, nor is it particularly edgy, though it gestures, briefly, toward something exploratory. If anything, it’s timid, unwilling to fully embrace horror, to probe the spiritual crisis at its center, or to commit to the far more compelling story it hints at: the making of a Witch.

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