The Carpenter’s Son
Holy dread
Here’s The Carpenter’s Son a film that leans hard into a deliberately unsettling act of theological imagination, one that reaches into the apocrypha, drags out a half-suppressed idea, and asks whether holiness itself might feel like horror when encountered without the cushioning of doctrine and distance.
Set during the Holy Family’s flight and exile, the film frames Joseph, Mary, and their child not as icons but as people living inside a mystery that refuses to behave. Nicolas Cage plays Joseph as a man straining under a responsibility he cannot rationalise, at once protective, bewildered, and quietly terrified. FKA twigs’s Mary is restrained and inward, a presence shaped by contemplation rather than spectacle, carrying a conviction that offers no immunity from fear.
And then there is the boy.
Played with unsettling restraint by Noah Jupe, this is not the glowing child of Christmas cards. This is a Jesus whose emerging power feels unstable; he’s not ‘Brighburn’ malevolent, but his powers are uncontained. The film draws inspiration from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical second-century text long regarded as troubling precisely because it depicts a young Jesus performing miracles that feel abrupt, even punitive. In director Lotfy Nathan’s hands, this becomes the film’s theological fuse.
There’s a moment in The Carpenter’s Son that quietly explains the entire film.
Joseph fashions a wooden idol, an object of devotion shaped by his own hands. Later, the boy smashes it.
It’s a simple gesture, almost throwaway. But it lands like a theological hammer blow. Because idolatry, at its core, iis about trying to shape God into something manageable, something that fits our expectations, fears, and need for control. And that, more than demons or violence, is the real horror this film is circling.
The Carpenter’s Son is an unusual, often frustrating, sometimes compelling act of religious horror. This is not a film asking whether Jesus is divine. It assumes that he is. The question is far more unsettling:
What happens when divine power appears before it has learned restraint and when the people closest to it try to manage it?
Despite its apocryphal roots, The Carpenter’s Son is surprisingly orthodox in its fundamentals. The Nativity unfolds in a stable, recognisably drawn from Luke’s Gospel. Joseph receives angelic warning dreams that send the family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter. Years later, Joseph doubts his own memory, but the film never implies these events are imaginary or symbolic. They are presented as real, grounding the story firmly within biblical history rather than alternative myth.
Likewise, Jesus experiences visions of his future: crucifixion, death, and resurrection. These aren’t framed as metaphors or psychological delusions. We’re invited to accept them as genuine foreknowledge. Destiny is not in question here, only how one lives while waiting for it.
This grounding matters, because it shapes the film’s approach to evil.
The Stranger (Satan) is played with earnest heart by Isla Johnston. She’s not a trickster abstraction or ironic metaphor, but a fallen spiritual being, clearly evil, clearly opposed to God, and clearly doomed. There’s no ambiguity about that and no invitation to sympathise with it.
What is interesting is its motivation.
This Satan isn’t trying to win a cosmic war. It knows how that story ends. Instead, it is driven by resentment, a desire to drag Jesus down to its own level, to infect him with the same bitterness and hatred it feels toward humanity. The goal is not domination, but corruption: to convince Jesus that people deserve punishment rather than mercy, and that power should be exercised through retribution.
There’s a faint echo of gnostic thinking in Satan’s rhetoric, talk of liberating humanity from flesh, of transcendence through rejection of the material world, but crucially, the film never endorses this. That worldview is presented as perverse, deforming, and spiritually dead. Matter is not the enemy here. Creation is not a mistake. The problem is resentment.
In that sense, Satan functions as a dark mirror, not just of what Jesus could become if he abandoned compassion, but of what humans become when they define themselves by grievance.
One of the film’s most theologically confident moves is also its biggest problem (as a horror film at least).
Whenever Jesus confronts evil spirits, he succeeds. They cannot resist him. His authority is innate and unquestioned. The danger Satan poses is not physical or existential, but moral.
This creates an intrinsic limitation on dread. We know where this story is going. We know Jesus will not fall. The film never seriously threatens the biblical arc, and because of that, Satan never quite feels like a source of catastrophic danger.
There’s a version of The Carpenter’s Son that might have generated far more terror by declaring early on that “all bets are off,” that this is a radical reimagining unconstrained by Scripture. That film would have been far more blasphemous but far more frightening.
Nathan doesn’t make that film. Instead, he chooses theological seriousness over horror maximalism. The result is a movie with moments of brutality (Roman tortures are depicted with stomach-turning cruelty) and some, mostly snake-induced, jump scares, but not enough to satisfy adrenaline junkies, and not enough sustained dread to rival slow-burn nightmares like Hereditary.
Where the film does generate genuine unease is through Joseph.
Nicolas Cage plays him as a man caught between devotion and fear, sincerity and control. Early on, he’s relatable: a father trying to protect his family, provide stability, and raise a son who frightens him precisely because he cannot fully understand him.
But as the film progresses, Joseph hardens. His faith becomes rigid. His protectiveness curdles into coercion. He tries to shape Jesus into something safe, contained, predictable, an idol rather than a mystery.
This is where the film’s most potent theme emerges. Joseph’s desire to control his son mirrors humanity’s desire to control God. When Jesus resists being shaped, Joseph responds with anger. When the idol shatters, Joseph lashes out.
The tragedy is that the film doesn’t quite give this arc enough room to breathe. We see Joseph become unpleasant, even cruel, but we don’t always feel the weight of the pressures driving him there. A version of the film told more squarely from Joseph’s perspective would have been bolder.
Instead, the narrative oscillates between Joseph’s story and Jesus’ “origin” story, diluting the emotional force of both.
Running quietly beneath all this is another recognisably biblical tension: law versus mercy.
Jesus shows instinctive compassion for those deemed impure… You know: lepers, the crucified, the outcast. He moves toward suffering rather than away from it. This places him at odds with the rigid purity concerns of his world, and increasingly at odds with Joseph’s fear-driven religiosity.
It’s a subtle but important thread. The film understands that Jesus’ ministry is not a rejection of holiness, but a redefinition of it, one rooted in proximity rather than separation.
As a horror film, The Carpenter’s Son is uneven. It lacks the raw terror to fully satisfy genre purists, and its tonal indecision blunts its sharpest edges.
As a theological provocation, it’s far more interesting.
This is a film about idolatry, not golden calves, but mental images of God we cling to because they reassure us. It’s about how easily faith becomes control, how quickly devotion curdles into resentment when God refuses to behave as expected.
And in its best moments, it reminds us that the most frightening thing isn’t demons, or Satan, or prophecy but the possibility that we might prefer an idol we can control to a God who refuses to be shaped by our hands.
Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:
ööö1/2
(3.5 - It may not be a great horror film. But it is a God-haunted one.)
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