Amid a proliferation of “family-friendly” Bible movies and TV shows, it’s striking to come across a film like R-rated The Carpenter’s Son. Its premise: What if Jesus had been tempted as a teenager, and his parents—especially his father—couldn’t deal with it?
Though described as a biblical horror movie, The Carpenter’s Son takes its cue from an ancient source that isn’t in any of our Bibles. An opening title card announces that the film is based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text from the mid to late second century.
The gospel in question portrays Jesus as a young, undisciplined child who flexes his powers a little too freely and is reprimanded by Joseph. Films have borrowed from this gospel before. The Young Messiah, The Book of Clarence, and the 1999 miniseries Jesus all adapted one of its more winsome passages, in which Jesus brings some birds to life.
But The Carpenter’s Son might be the first film to offer a straightforward depiction of some of the text’s darker moments, such as when Jesus strikes another child dead supernaturally.
The movie could have gone full-blown heretical, portraying Jesus as a monster of sorts. But The Carpenter’s Son, while certainly not biblically orthodox, doesn’t go that far. Its treatment of Jesus is far more ambiguous, and through Joseph, it focuses on what it means to keep faith in dire circumstances.
The film follows Joseph (Nicolas Cage), Mary (FKA Twigs), and Jesus (A Quiet Place’s Noah Jupe) as they move to a new town in Roman Egypt, still on the run at least 15 years after Jesus was born. It’s not clear who they’re hiding from exactly, but Joseph says in a voice-over that “calamity” follows them and they have been “driven from every home.”
Joseph boards up the windows and scatters sand outside the door to protect their new home from neighbors and evil spirits. Jesus is haunted by nightmares of his death and resurrection that leave him screaming in the middle of the night. When he joins a class taught by a local rabbi, a mysterious girl with scratches on her face (Isla Johnston) draws him away and tempts him to commit forbidden acts, such as almost touching a sleeping leper.
The girl’s identity is revealed somewhat gradually, but it’s not hard to figure out who she is, and the trailer gives it away, so there’s no point in hiding the ball. She’s Satan, or a manifestation of him. The film’s inclusion of her is one of its more significant departures from the Infancy Gospel—and one of the key ways it pulls the story in a more biblical direction.
In the Infancy Gospel, it is Jesus himself who terrifies everyone, and Satan is never even mentioned. But in the film, it is Satan who attacks the neighbors and draws unwanted attention to Jesus, and it is Satan who tries to drive a wedge between Jesus and Joseph, partly by baiting Jesus with the fact that Joseph isn’t his real father. Whatever you make of the way this all plays out, it at least makes more sense biblically to pin all this disruption on the satanic figure, who calls herself “the Adversary.”
And if you are willing to engage with parts of the movie’s premise, it’s interesting to consider how some of the real adult Jesus’ bolder actions might have begun as small acts of rebellion against the culture he grew up in. In the film, child Jesus refuses to touch the aforementioned leper at first because the leper is “unclean.” That’s what his earthly father and his rabbi have drilled into him. But of course, Jesus has come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, as Matthew records him saying chapters before he cleanses a leper who kneels before him (5:17; 8:3). That healing is God’s will, not the will of the Adversary.
The Carpenter’s Son focuses on Joseph’s doubts and the ways they play out in his efforts to be a father to Jesus. Mary was visited by an angel, and she carried the Son of God in her womb for nine months. But Joseph got all his divine messages through dreams, and he had to trust that those dreams were real, clinging to memories of them years after the fact.
The key concept the film takes from the Infancy Gospel isn’t the miracles but the tense relationship between Joseph and Jesus. Joseph is a father, and an adoptive one at that, committed to raising this child in the Jewish faith (memorizing Scripture, saying prayers) while also correcting him when he seems out of line.
In the Infancy Gospel, Joseph grabs Jesus by the ear. In the film, he gets similarly punitive—and like many parents, he gets so exasperated that he says and does things he’ll probably regret.
Writer-director Lotfy Nathan got his start making documentaries, and he brings an unflinching realism to aspects of the story that most Jesus movies avoid, from the umbilical cord that Joseph cuts after Jesus is born to the stained loincloth of a man who has been chained to the ground next to a hill where people are crucified.
Nathan also comes up with genuinely horrific images, like a snake that emerges from people’s mouths or a dark portal to hell ringed by squirming, ill-defined masses of flesh. Some moments play like nods to 1973’s The Exorcist, from ominous close-ups on an idol that Joseph is working on to a possessed person’s bulging throat.
The biblical and horror genres aren’t as far apart as one might think. The most famous (and successful) fusion of the two is arguably The Passion of the Christ, which is haunted by Satan from beginning to end. But the point of films like that (and The Exorcist)is to highlight the reality of evil so we appreciate the necessity and reality of goodness.
There are hints of that in The Carpenter’s Son, but the film is bleak overall. It begins on the night of Jesus’ birth, with labor pains and the terror of fleeing Herod’s soldiers. It wallows in anger and affliction before ending with death and violence and a sense that things still aren’t resolved.
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In the film, Joseph does see a light in the sky when Jesus is born, and it becomes one of the memories he clings to when all turns dark. But in the Bible, the point of the star creating that light was to summon worshipers to see the Son of God. The Joseph of this film never gets that extra confirmation, and he never gets to see Jesus sitting with the teachers in the temple at the age of 12.
The biblical Joseph had more to sustain his faith; the Joseph of this film gets no hint of Jesus’ wisdom or holiness. Instead, all he has is an increasingly powerful and rebellious teenager he doesn’t understand.
And that, more or less, is what the audience is left with too. I’m all in favor of projects that compel us to see the Bible with fresh eyes (think of The Chosen), as well as films that explore how Jesus grew into his own self-awareness. (This film would make an interesting triple bill with The Young Messiah and Last Days in the Desert.)
But in the end we need to feel that the story connects to the biblical Jesus somehow, that it portrays him as the Messiah we know and love. And The Carpenter’s Son doesn’t do that. It begins by telling us that the apocryphal gospels “describe events missing in the timeline of the New Testament.” But at times it feels as if the film is taking place in a different dimension entirely.
Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.
