The Carpenter's Son

The New Testament: is it the greatest story ever told? Belief or otherwise is of course a personal matter (though it’s a bit unreasonable to suggest that it’s the only story that might be considered true), but from a literary perspective it has serious shortcomings. Its themes and characters are mostly underdeveloped, it has no proper structure and substitutes heavy-handed symbolism for drama. The prose is mostly very dry, interspersed with sensationalist passages and what occasionally comes across as early psychedelic writing. To be fair, though, its varied nature means that most people can find something interesting in it, and though the excision of the additional Septuagint texts in 1885 removed most of the really colourful stuff from the Bible itself, that material is still available in other archives, and ripe for adaptation.

In adapting a portion of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Lotfy Nathan has stressed that the Bible was never intended to be cosy and reassuring, at least not in its totality. He’s interested in exploring the nature of faith, which he does so through the doubts of Joseph, Jesus himself, and, potentially, Christian viewers unfamiliar with the material. Given the impression he made three years ago with the powerful (and far more morally resonant) Harka, he might also prompt some viewers to question their faith in cinema. The distributors of this film have been so determined to present it as genre that it’s hard to find a UK screening which starts before 10pm; no grace is shown toward those who depend on buses.

It is inevitably difficult to tell a story of this sort without attracting controversy. The very start, in which Mary (FKA twigs) screams as she gives birth, will alienate some viewers, but credit where it’s due – there is at least some effort at realism here, as in the fact that she and her son both have brown skin and black hair. There’s no time for waiting around for shepherds and their ilk as Joseph (Nicolas Cage, who sounds badly in need of some cough sweets) warns that people are coming for the child, so they have to flee as soon as Mary can stand.

This proves to be the start of a lengthy series of wanderings. We flash forward to a point where the child (now played by Noah Jupe) is a teenager. Mary looks exactly the same age, which gives a curiously incestuous cast to some scenes in which they cling to each other and talk about running away together. Joseph has the whole three times as big, eight times as old Biblical patriarch thing going on, but he still knuckles down and gets a job as a carpenter when they arrive at what seems like a friendly settlement (it helps to know that there’s a sizeable excised section of text in which Jesus gets them thrown out of various places by doing magic tricks and scaring people; this is alluded to here but never explained). The actual names of the main characters are never used, but it’s obvious enough that they could probably sue for defamation if still alive.

All of this is prelude. The action proper kicks off when Jesus starts having nightmares about being nailed to a cross, and begins to work small miracles, such as crushing and then restoring a locust (with all six of its legs, even though Genesis insists they only have four). Joseph washes Mary’s feet, which are not those of a working woman, let alone a wanderer, and effectively breaks the fourth wall by talking to God, expressing his dissatisfaction at raising an ungrateful boy who might be the result of Mary cheating on him.

It has never occurred to that boy to wonder if this white guy is really his dad, but he is prompted to ask questions by a strange, androgynous girl who hangs around on the edge of the action. Isla Johnston, in this role, is the best thing about the film, with an otherworldly stare which recalls a certain figure from the work of Jacques Cazotte. Her adversarial approach fits nicely with the older, more sophisticated philosophical ideas pertinent to this tradition, so it’s a shame when, towards the end, all subtlety is abandoned in favour of pronouncements about evil which are anachronistic and reductive.

The biggest problem with the film, however, is that Nathan’s narrative structure and dialogue are very much in keeping with the rhythms of the book from which they come, and are, as a consequence, stilted and dull. There’s no energy to any of this. There’s no compelling moral or psychological dimension, and no direct reason to invest in the characters. Even Cage looks like he wandered in there by mistake and is only half awake. Fervent believers will be put off the film by its muddled approach to dogma, whilst others will be frustrated by its flatness and by its lack of soul.

Reviewed on: 20 Nov 2025