You have to respect writer-director Lotfy Nathan for making a horror movie about Jesus given this social and political climate. (Petitions to block the release of the “blasphemous” production are already up and rolling.) He earns some extra points for making The Carpenter’s Son as unapologetically buck wild as it appears in its first full-length trailer. It’s a Nicolas Cage movie, so we didn’t expect anything less. The Longlegsactor is in peak form here, too. In a previous teaser, he pronounced Satan with all of the emphasis on the second syllable (“Suh-TAHN”). Now, we have a full-throated, guttural wail of “My faith has been shattered!” to add to the list of great Nicolas Cage line deliveries, and the movie hasn’t even come out yet.
Cage isn’t playing Jesus himself in this creepy Christ feature. That honor (or burden) goes to A Quiet Place‘s Noah Jupe. Cage plays his father, Joseph, with musician FKA Twigs (who recently appeared in The Crow) stepping in as Mary. The official synopsis reads as follows: “A remote village in Roman-era Egypt explodes into spiritual warfare when a carpenter, his wife and their child are targeted by supernatural forces in The Carpenter’s Son. Joseph, Mary and their teenage son Jesus have lived for years under threat, clinging to their faith and traditions. But a stopover in a small settlement unleashes growing chaos when a mysterious stranger (Isla Johnston) tries to entice young Jesus to abandon his devout father’s rules. With every pull of temptation, the boy is lured into a forbidden world, as a terrified Joseph realizes that a demonic power is at work. Violent, unnatural events inexplicably follow Jesus, and he begins to experience nightmarish visions of the future. Finally, he learns the fearsome truth about his new playmate, as well as the child’s real name: Satan.”
Nathan drew from his Coptic Christian background to create this film, but it’s hard to imagine he learned a lot of the material here in Sunday school. There probably wasn’t quite as much focus on screaming or coughing up blood, at least. We already know how this story ends, but audiences can experience its genesis in theaters November 14.
