Joshua

This is a smart psychological horror film. An upscale NYC couple bring home their new baby and their older child -- a nine-year-old boy prodigy -- starts acting extremely creepy as suspicious accidents and odd behavior increase. Director George Ratliff creeps you out without any significant blood or gore, making this movie a lot more like Rosemary's Baby than, say, The Omen. With a smart script and great performances by everyone, including Sam Rockwell, Vera Farmiga and the kid playing Joshua, the only downside to this movie is a rushed "and-then-it-ends" anti-climax that I found unsatisfying. Still, this is worth a look if you like scary movies.

This is a very strange and unconventional horror/thriller with fantastic performances by Vera Farmiga and Jacob Kogan. Usually kid actors in horror films bug me (I'm lookin' at you, new OMEN kid!), but this little dude totally creeped me out in a Martin Stephens kind of way. It's an excellent performance and one of the best things this offbeat movie has going for it. This movie's plot sounds like typical "Bad Seed" ground, but it twists and turns into really bizarre territory, disorienting the viewer to the point where you have no idea where it's going or where it's been. I'm still not sure if I even liked it, but it did make me feel incredibly uneasy, and I guess that's worth something.

Joshua is a criminally underrated movie, presumably because it was marketed towards the horror crowd, the majority of which is bound not to be satisfied with it. It's not a gorefest. It's about something much more horrific. Imagine your world being manipulated by the person one would least expect, your weaknesses exploited, your reputation destroyed, the motive, the scheme, and the process never to be explained? The important thing is to see this impressively written and directed film without any substantial knowledge of the plot beforehand. It slowly unfolds, an ominous atmosphere slowly growing like a cancer.

Sam Rockwell, one of the most likable and natural contemporary actors, and Vera Farmiga, one of the most unassuming and realistic up-and-coming actresses, are perfectly cast, unlikely to be choices for a typical psychological thriller as disturbing as this one, making their drama more dramatic and disconcerting, having to do with the easily miscommunication of feelings between parents and young children.

Joshua's music score assists the the disturbing moments in this film with its brooding. The music young Joshua, a child piano prodigy, has a discernible penchant towards is very suitable dissonant classical pieces. Even the Dave Matthews song that closes the movie on its creepy, powerful final shot is a properly somber punctuation as the film leaves you blown away, having taken Rockwell's journey right along with him. George Ratliff is a very talented, promising new director who will hopefully follow up with a more appreciated film.

completely mis-marketed as an Omen-type horror film, there's a lot more going on in this one than in most of the recent similar scary fare. first things first: there's no supernatural hoo-hah. (ah, so refreshing.) it's an unsettling, strangely plausible horror film... seemingly made especially for parents. a few plot elements bothered me, and i felt there was one misstep (involving a Dave Matthews song, btw!), but overall it was an effective chiller. Vera Farmiga as the increasingly imbalanced mother and Celia Weston as the holy-rolling but genuinely concerned mother-in-law are both excellent, and Sam Rockwell delivers another compelling and subtly idiosyncratic performance. George Ratliff, who directed the engrossing and discomfiting 2001 documentary, Hell House, shows promise as a narrative filmmaker.

"Cruel children, crying babies, All grow up as geese and gabies, Hated, as their age increases, By their nephews and their nieces." Robert Louis Stevenson

If you're thinking of starting a family, don't see Joshua. If you think your stockbroker spouse is a stable breadwinner capable of providing you a view of Central Park, don't see Joshua. If you think all your children will be lovable, don't see Joshua.

However, if you want the bejesus scared out of you by a kid so bright he could skip two grades and play Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 12 at recess, director George Ratliff, whose Hell House could have entitled this expert psychological thriller, has fashioned a hell of a cautionary tale about appearances and reality, unlovable kids and their clueless parents. The slow disintegration of an upper-middle class family is so carefully drawn that the first third of the film seems like a walk in the park with a few scrapes from some errant shrubbery. When, however, nine-year old Joshua Cairn (Jacob Kogan) begins missing his parents' affection, displaced to his crybaby newborn sister, strange but not too strange things happen, not easily ascribable to him.

As in most successful thrillers involving miscreant kids, even to the end is a doubt that they could be the source of the growing terror. Although comparisons to The Bad Seed and Rosemary's Baby seem fair, Kogan bears a strong resemblance to Buddy Swan, who played the young Charles Foster Kane with chilling deadpan. Kane's lifelong hang up over being separated from his family is an appropriate allusion to clarify the psychological ramifications in this film.

Although I was quite pleased with the slow exposition, because I think things unravel slowly in privileged families, the payoff ending came too quickly and without the supernatural underpinnings the buildup seemed to promise.

"Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed . . . ." David Elkind, Child Psychologist