In a well-to-do area of Manhattan, nine year old Joshua (Jacob Kogan) is intelligent enough to be moved up two grades at school. He speaks and acts with a maturity far beyond his years. His prodigious piano playing favors the work of Bartok, to the extent that he openly barfs when his family get together for a cheery rendition of the more child-friendly “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. Joshua also has a tendency to demonstrate Ancient Egyptian embalming techniques on his cuddly toys. His parents (Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga) love him but it becomes steadily apparent that he possesses a growing resentment for the baby sister who now preoccupies both of their lives at his expense. As mom slides into post-natal depression and borderline hysteria, dad gets sexually frustrated, falls under pressure at work and, moreover, slowly becomes convinced something is very wrong with his son.
The “Bad Seed” concept resurfaces within the mainstream horror genre every few years with mixed results. Hollywood’s last attempt to seriously deal with the subject of a killer kid within the framework of a thriller was THE GOOD SON, a well-intentioned movie that fell victim to routine plotting. JOSHUA is influenced by Roman Polanski’s approach to horror and tackles the contentious subject without the melodramatic / gruesome flourishes the sub-genre tends to favor. Like the little seen (albeit more conventional) RELATIVE FEAR, the movie is carefully written and directed (with a very subtle, almost subliminal use of color and camera placement) so that considerable ambiguity surrounds the true nature of the eponymous kid.
Obvious comparisons to THE OMEN – the ultimate “evil kid” movie – are only useful in the sense that JOSHUA resembles Richard Donner’s favored conception of that film. The increasing amount of strange occurrences and, ultimately, deaths, could be the work of an “evil” child / budding psychopath or they could just be unfortunate coincidences. Sure, Joshua is strange, a tad messed up and prone to disturbing behavior, but what nine year old boy isn’t? George Ratliff’s movie smartly never draws any conclusions about how afraid we should be of this well spoken, immaculately presented pre-teen outcast.
Representative of this film’s muted approach is the decision to keep the most dramatic, most horror-centric moments in the story off-screen : notably the mysterious demise of the family dog (following the unexplained deaths of the class gerbils at Joshua’s school) and the fatal fall suffered by a key supporting character that triggers the final act.
JOSHUA’s sustained sense of unease is preserved via quietly distressing scenes of personal, domestic horror rather than images of a scowling youngster battering his elders over the noggin with a shovel a la MIKEY. Rockwell’s discovery that his home videos now include creepy footage of Joshua sneaking in to the baby’s room to film her (and possibly worse) is genuinely chilling. A superbly executed climactic sequence involves an on-edge Rockwell, provoked by Joshua’s taunting and still grieving a loved-one’s death, suddenly, repeatedly hitting his son in front of dozens of families on a sunny day in the park. This scene, and the film as a whole, reflects those dark, repressed thoughts many a parent has felt about their child : is my child willfully malicious or even capable of being evil? Does it make me a terrible parent if I really have the urge to slap my child right now? Typical of this film’s balance of intense drama and dark humor is the dry response to this event of Rockwell’s boss, Michael McKean : “Don’t you know never to beat your kid in public at the weekend?!”.
Ratliff has made a slow burning but absorbing film full of surprising humor and capped by a low key, ambiguous ending. The story is rich with irony : both parents and the audience have an inkling of Joshua’s true nature, but no one else sees it, and Rockwell’s attempts to convey it lead only to accusations of child-abuse. In our child-protecting, pedophile-fearing world, an evil child has everyone, especially the law, on their side.
Ultimately, this is less a pure horror film than it is a frank, disturbing study of the emotional trauma of being a parent and the extent of the sibling rivalry that exists from the birth of a second child. Sporting an unflattering haircut and a believably haunted, dog-tired look, Farmiga bravely and superbly plays an unsympathetic mother on the brink of an all-too-real descent into mental collapse. As the more sympathetic half of the fearful couple, Rockwell is warm and natural as a loving dad who inevitably cracks under pressure. Crucially, young Kogan is marvelously unsettling as Joshua. He effortlessly combines an underlying, never over-played sense of potential threat with a man-child persona (occasionally reminiscent of Haley Joel Osment in THE SIXTH SENSE, though minus the warmth), veering from creepily clinical to amusingly self-serious.
-Steven West
DVD Features:
- Commentary by writer/director George Ratliff and writer David Gilbert.
- Extensive cast and crew interviews
- Deleted scenes
- Dave Matthews music video for his song “Fly”.
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
