My Thoughts on The Carpenter's Son
I'll be honest, a horror film about the childhood of Jesus starring Nicolas Cage as Joseph sounds like it was pitched during a round of late-night “what if” jokes when drunk, so I really wasn't sure what to expect here.
But it ends up being quite an intense film, but also surprisingly intimate and thoughtful - one that refuses to fit inside a single box.
The movie opens by explaining that it’s inspired by early Christian writings that never made it into the official Bible, and it makes it clear that the film isn’t trying to rewrite scripture, as it’s just imagining something beyond what we know, and Jesus isn’t even called Jesus here - he’s simply “the Boy”.
His parents are “the Mother” and “the Carpenter”, and there was something about stripping away the familiar names that made the story feel less like a reenactment and more like a personal curiosity from the director, Lofty Nathan.
The Boy, played by Noah Jupe, is quiet, watchful, and already carrying a sort of heaviness that a child shouldn’t have to understand, and Jupe plays him with a kind of restlessness that felt right for a kid who senses something strange happening inside himself but can’t articulate it.
Early in the film, the family flees after King Herod orders the killing of newborn boys, with all the chaos never needing any exaggeration - this is a family running for their lives with a child who may be the very reason they’re in danger.
When the family ultimately ends up in a small village in Roman-era Egypt, the mood shifts and it becomes quieter, amd we start to see the Boy’s abilities start surfacing in some unsettling ways, while The Mother watches with a mix of worry and devotion - even in silence she adds something impactful to the family dynamic.
Nicolas Cage as the Carpenter is one of the reasons I was curious about the film in the first place, as Cage has this ability to go from softly spoken to volcanic, sometimes in the same scene, and the movie uses that well.
His Joseph is devout and determined but deeply unsure of himsef, as he’s desperately trying to hold everything together, although for some reason he keeps his usual American accent while the rest of his family speaks differently, which felt a a little strange at first.
The horror in the film mainly leans towards psychological, where The Boy starts encountering a mysterious girl played by Isla Johnston, and she has this eerie calm, like she already knows every fear the Boy has and exactly how to use each one, and the scenes involving possession feel tied to the emotional stakes rather than just thrown in for shock.
The movie also doesn’t take any cheap shots at Christianity, and even though some people online are already calling it “blasphemous” and review bombing it, I didn’t get that vibe at all, as it takes the subject matter seriously, even when it dares to imagine something outside the boundaries people are used to.
I was also surprised by how strongly the film leans into family tensions, as there’s something universal in watching parents try to protect a child who’s changing faster than they can understand.
The Mother and the Carpenter are terrified, not just of the world outside but of what the Boy might become, who is caught between the life his parents want for him and the future he keeps seeing in flashes that he doesn’t know how to interpret, and that conflict helps give the story a lot more emotional weight than I expected.
It's certainly a movie that takes some big risks, and even when I didn’t agree with every choice, I did admire the willingness to try something so strange and ambitious, and by the end, I felt like I had watched a horror film, a family drama, and a spiritual story all wrapped into one.
A lot of people expecting to be offended might just end up watching something far more thoughtful than they had originally assumed.
Or maybe not.
Just watch out for the snakes.