The Carpenter's Son

It's a bad and slow movie. It's more fun to watch the paint dry on the wall for an hour and a half. I paid $4, wasted time and money!

It could be better if it weren't biblical, but right at the beginning they warn you that it's "based" on the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, the one about the supposed childhood of Jesus Christ.

In short: Jesus' family flees to a village in Egypt and is tormented by a bloody demon.

Joseph, Jesus' father, is the old Nicolas Cage, 60 years old, apparently a rigid and religious man, also a retired soldier. He doubts whether his son is really a god miracle, perhaps that's why he keeps his mouth open the whole movie (as always, N. Cage only knows how to make that face).

Mary, Jesus' mother, is FKA Twigs, 37 years old, looks like a young woman who hasn't even reached thirty. She adores her son and loves him very much, she would sacrifice herself for him, but during the movie she is just an irrelevant supporting character.

The young Jesus, supposedly 15 years old, is a confused teenager who doesn't know who he is or who his father is, but feels he has great powers and perhaps some great responsibilities.

A sadomasochistic young woman tempts the young Jesus until we discover that she is the angel Satan who was banished from heaven and blah blah blah...

The film doesn't cause so much horror through blasphemy, but it has quite a few historical inaccuracies! In that desolate village, in the middle of the desert, there are a dozen people condemned for "witchcraft" and lepers, who are tortured on a stone hill with three crosses! That's a lot of evil for so few people!

In Brazil, they translated the title to "Shadows in the Desert," perhaps because saying the film is about the carpenter's son (aka Jesus) would be very offensive to traditional christians.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting much going into this. I'm not a religious person, but enjoy the allegory of Bronze Age tales. The direction was superb, the film genuinely scary. There were some really neat filming tricks used, for all you photography nerds out there to feast on. Nic Cage was, well, Nic Cage. That's good or bad depending on your feelings about him as one of the most interesting and polarising actors in modern cinema.

The movie The Carpenter's Son positions itself as a bold, controversial genre-bender: part religious drama, part supernatural horror. The story (loosely inspired by the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas) follows a family hiding in Roman-era Egypt: Joseph (played by Nicolas Cage), Mary (FKA twigs) and their son, known only as "the Boy" (Noah Jupe). The Boy begins to question his guardian's authority, discovers ominous powers, and as he awakens them the family becomes beset by "horrors both natural and divine". Is good it has a lot of twists and turns.

This movie was painful to watch. I was somewhat excited after the trailer, but none of it was what I expected. It was slow, Jesus was wild, and it just felt, wrong, for a lack of a better explanation. I could have skipped this and felt okay. I tried my hardest not to fall asleep. Ill be okay to never see this one again.

Watched at AMC on 11-19-2025.

The Carpenter's Son" approaches one of history's greatest works of literary fiction, the Biblical narrative, with a fresh and unexpected lens. The film re-imagines the familiar story of the carpenter's son not simply as a sacred figure beyond our reach, but as a human adolescent grappling with extraordinary power, familial duty and the weight of prophecy. While the original text presents the boy as divine from the outset, this adaptation allows for doubt, fear and moral complexity - thereby making the story more relevant to our times.

The visual language is bold and haunting, reminding us that even mythic figures can be rendered with raw humanity: the father's anxiety, the mother's quiet strength, the boy's temptation and rebellion each resonate. Though the film shifts tone - infusing horror, supernatural dread and a sense of cosmic struggle - it retains the core of the "carpenter son" archetype and the larger themes of sacrifice, identity and the clash between the sacred and the profane.

In this sense, "The Carpenter's Son" can be judged a fair adaptation of that translates the original fiction into the cinematic idiom of our era. By doing so it invites viewers to engage with the foundation myth in a way that is both familiar and unsettling, prompting us to ask: what would divine purpose feel like if we lived it as humans? The result is entertaining, provocative and unexpectedly relevant.