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Written by Roger Moore, MCT
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Tuesday, 10 July 2007 |
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 ___
JOSHUA
3 stars (out of 5)
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga, Jacob Kogan, Celia Weston.
Director: George Ratliff.
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Industry rating: R for language and some disturbing behavior by a child.
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There's a seriously broken but depressingly familiar family at the heart of "Joshua," a psycho-thriller of the "Omen"/"The Good Son" school. That familiarity will chill any parent who hasn't outgrown horror movies. There is evil afoot here. And it's not the bogeyman.
Brad and Abby Cairn are well-to-do New Yorkers who have just welcomed baby Lily into their lives. They and their families shower the little bundle with joy.
But standing over the corner is the creepy older son. Joshua, age 9, is plainly a very smart boy. He's practically a piano prodigy. He's just wrapped a bit tight. You can tell by the way he keeps his hair, just so, in the way he buttons his shirts all the way to the top.
Joshua observes all this love. He sees that it isn't directed at him. He throws up.
"You know, you don't have to love me. It's not a rule."
Long before we spot the cracks in the parents' relationship - the brittle mental state of Abby (Vera Farmiga in a fearlessly naked performance), the stresses that drive-by dad and broker Brad (Sam Rockwell) is facing - we feel the fear.
We fear for the baby, with every crackle of the baby monitor. We fear for the parents, who may not survive whatever it is that is making the toddler scream through the night.
We fear for the pets.
"Joshua" is a fright show of modest chills, all built around the disintegration of this family. Co-writer-director George Ratliff, who did the heavy-handed but effective documentary "Hell House," about a fundamentalist church's efforts to create its vision of hell in a Halloween haunted house, sets us up for the supernatural. He introduces Brad's mom (the great Celia Weston), a woman who sees the wreck before her, but who is here to be mocked for her religious solution to their problems.
Ratliff is overly patient at revealing the things Joshua may or may not be doing, the clues the parents are missing. He borrows heavily from "The Omen" when he's not cribbing, expertly, from the most haunting, night-video images of "The Blair Witch Project."
The film benefits from terrific performances. Farmiga, with the angriest version of postpartum depression ever filmed, comes utterly unglued before our eyes. Abby veers from enraged to medicated out of her skull. Rockwell, the slap-happy wiseacre, makes Brad a peace keeper who tries to joke his way through "this hurdle" in their lives until he starts to see something more sinister at work.
And Kogan, the creepiest kid to hit the screen since Macaulay Culkin, just watches it all - impassive but malevolent.
Then the third act finally opens and the filmmakers have to commit to what is going on here. "Joshua" gets lost on the way to the cemetery.
All these rich ingredients - Abby's fey, composer brother (Dallas Roberts), the only one who gets Joshua; the rattling of construction in the apartment upstairs; Abby's collapsing mental state; Brad's stumbling career and his interest in other, less angry women; Joshua's fixation on ancient Egypt and mummies - and Ratliff can't bring them to a boil.
Yet for all its failings (giggling is the only proper response to the finale), "Joshua" still manages that awful sting of recognition. Horror movies aren't really for parents. But here's one any parent will appreciate, a movie that taps into the legitimate fear that the terrors of the outside world that you instinctively want to protect your children from are on this side of that locked and chained door.
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