Joshua

Joshua is a snail's pace thriller about an unquestionably creepy and potentially homicidal 9 year-old. Though it makes some steps towards achieving originality in a genre already played out by The Omen, Bad Seed, and various others, it still ends up falling flat due to its nonexistent momentum and the one-note chills of its titular pint-sized villain. Joshua (Jacob Kogan) has a persistently blank expression, an obsession with death, and a habit of sneaking up on his parents when they least expect it. At least it's refreshing that he's not necessarily Satan's spawn or some other ridiculously convoluted villain. He's simply a dangerously clever child genius living with his two parents in a lush Manhattan apartment. His mother, Abby, (Vera Farmiga) has just given birth to a second child and while she and his father, Brad, (Sam Rockwell) fawn over the infant, Joshua begins to become frustrated. Both Joshua and his family get some tragic drama to their stories beyond the spooks and scares, which is nice, but ultimately futile as every attempt at seriousness seems undercut by Joshua's silly morbidity or the maudlin, patience testing storytelling strategies. To put it simply: Watching a child abuse his parents into neuroses is only entertaining for so long. After the umpteenth time Joshua does something weird, it's just more of the same. There's some sense that his misbehaviors escalate with time, but there's no level at which they stop being redundant.

The execution here is novel in its attempts at depicting a real horror to a real family. The cast, particularly Rockwell, is great. The film just doesn't work, though. It sulks and drags. The narrative casually bounces around as if there was no immediate destination for the feature. We see brief concerns at Brad's job. We find out that Brad's mother (Celia Weston) is trying to force religion on Joshua. There's so much minutia and yet nothing ever seems to be happening. In fact, all that's ever happening is that Joshua is driving his parents slowly crazy. It's a maddening process to watch and certainly not the kind of horror that resonates beyond the initial tugs of nervousness over what Joshua is capable of. It becomes very clear, very quickly that he is capable of anything, and from that point on its all about the long haul to the completion of his evil plan.

Grade: C