The Carpenter's Son

The Terror of the Miracle

There is a silence in the New Testament, a void of nearly two decades between the flight to Egypt and the emergence of the adult Messiah. It is in this gap—these "lost years"—that director Lotfy Nathan locates *The Carpenter’s Son*, a film that dares to ask a question both theological and terrifying: What is it like to parent a child who holds the power of the cosmos, but possesses the temperament of a confused adolescent?

Drawing from the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas—a text historically sidelined by the Church for its depiction of a petulant, sometimes violent young Jesus—Nathan crafts a piece of cinema that is less a "faith-based" feature and more a exercise in domestic dread. This is not the polished, golden-hour Galilee of Sunday school filmstrips. It is a harsh, granular Roman Egypt, shot on coarse 35mm by Simon Beaufils, where the heat is visible and the shadows hide entities that are ancient and hungry.

The film’s greatest subversive act is its casting of Nicolas Cage as the Carpenter (Joseph). Audiences conditioned to expect "Cage Rage"—the manic, bug-eyed energy of *Mandy* or *Longlegs*—will be disarmed by the profound quiet of his performance here. Cage plays Joseph not as a saint, but as a man crushed by the weight of a secret he barely understands. He is a father living in perpetual flinch, terrified not only of the Roman soldiers hunting them but of the Boy (Noah Jupe) sitting at his dinner table. Cage captures the exhaustion of a guardian trying to impose rules on a being who can rewrite the laws of physics. It is a portrait of "quiet despair" that anchors the film’s supernatural wanderings in a heartbreaking human reality.

The horror in *The Carpenter’s Son* is not derived from jump scares, but from the violation of the natural order. In one pivotal scene, the Boy, brilliantly played by Jupe with a mix of innocence and alien detachment, resurrects a crushed insect. It is not a moment of wonder; it is a moment of nausea. The sound design amplifies the wet, unnatural crunch of life returning where it shouldn't. When the Boy later interacts with "The Stranger" (a chilling Isla Johnston)—an androgynous, Satanic presence tempting him to test his limits—the film shifts into a gnostic nightmare. We are forced to confront the idea that a miracle, performed without wisdom, is indistinguishable from a curse.

The narrative does occasionally buckle under its own theological weight. In its determination to be serious and atmospheric, the pacing sometimes drags, mistaking slowness for profundity. The relationship between the Mother (FKA twigs) and the Boy is given less oxygen than the father-son dynamic, leaving her character feeling more like an icon than a person.

Yet, *The Carpenter’s Son* remains a vital entry in the canon of religious cinema precisely because it strips away the comfort of divinity. It posits that the Incarnation—the infinite becoming finite—would not be a peaceful event, but a violent collision. Lotfy Nathan has not made a movie for the pious, but for the curious and the fearful. He suggests that before the Carpenter’s son could save the world, he first had to learn not to destroy it, and that the cost of that lesson was paid by the mortal father who stood in the blast zone.