It’s hard to know how seriously one should take a film that casts Nicolas Cage as Joseph, the carpenter who acted as the adoptive father of Jesus. One might expect, with the actor still relying on his trademark California intonation and histrionic outbursts, that this would be another one of his late-stage career larks, like playing Dracula or himself. But in The Carpenter’s Son, a bafflingly serious stew of horror, drama and fantasy, it slowly starts to dawn on us that this is in fact, not a joke. What it is I couldn’t tell you but entertaining it most definitely isn’t.
The film, from Egypt-born, London-raised writer and director Lotfy Nathan, is inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a text seen as heretical by some, which offers highly debated “insight” into the early years of Jesus. Nathan begins by clueing us into the fact that this isn’t your vicar’s Sunday school biblical drama, as a screaming cave-based birth sequence is followed by a bonfire of babies, King Herod’s men throwing on more and more as mothers wail at the side. Cage’s unnamed carpenter and the new mother at his side (FKA twigs) escape and we leap forward to see them moving into a remote village with their teenage offspring, known as the boy (Noah Jupe).
