Prolific actor Nicolas Cage stars in the upcoming religious horror movie The Carpenter’s Son, basically a spooky story about Jesus. That was a delightfully weird, welcome revelation to me, a fan of Cage’s work in films such as Pig and Face/Off. Even if the movie’s subject matter appears to be generating a teensy amount of controversy ahead of its release.
Writer-director Lotfy Nathan based his Jesus horror movie on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal (sometimes deemed heretical) gospel about Jesus’ childhood, from ages 5 through 12. The Infancy Gospel explores a young man learning to use supernatural abilities, sometimes with disastrous results. Jesus kills a couple of kids, blinding the parents of one of them. He’s generally a superpowered malevolent scamp, at least according to the disputed account of pre-Teenjus.
Here’s the official synopsis of The Carpenter’s Son, which makes it a little clearer how Nathan’s adapting the gospel:
The Carpenter’s Son tells the dark story of a family hiding out in Roman Egypt. The son, known only as ‘the Boy’, is driven to doubt by another mysterious child and rebels against his guardian, the Carpenter, revealing inherent powers and a fate beyond his comprehension. As he exercises his own power, the Boy and his family become the target of horrors, natural and divine.
Cage plays the Carpenter (aka Joseph), and he’s joined by FKA Twigs (the 2024 remake ofThe Crow) as the Mother and Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) as the Boy. While we only get a snippet of Cage’s performance in The Carpenter’s Son‘s first teaser trailer, it’s intense enough to convince me to see Nathan’s Biblical horror flick as soon as possible. Some Christians appear not to have the same enthusiasm, at least based on a couple of pre-release Reddit posts and blogs.
Whether the controversy over the film spills beyond minor internet reaction remains to be seen, but those offended by The Carpenter’s Son can always get their Cage fix elsewhere: Say, in the 2014 Christian apocalyptic thriller Left Behind.
