The Carpenter’s Son Review: The Passion of the Teenage Christ

Conventional wisdom says that there are Old Testament Christians and New Testament Christians, but this oversimplification leaves out the third and most entertaining segment of the faithful: the Apocrypha fans.

The Bible is not a singular text, but an anthology that has been re-edited over the millennia, with whole books excised. Labeled the Apocrypha, they contain stories that are too strange, too esoteric, too contradictory, or even just too awkward to be included in the main text. Like the cannibalistic giants, the talking lion, and the bit where Jesus straight up murders some kid.

What makes the Apocrypha interesting to scholars is that they delve into the darker, more challenging elements of the divine without just writing everything off as the will of God. The Carpenter’s Son, Lotfy Nathan’s extremely loose adaptation of the Infancy Gospel of St. Thomas, actually probes two of the major questions left unanswered by the canonical Bible: What was it like to be the teen Jesus, and what was it like to raise the teen Jesus?

That latter task is placed on the bent shoulders of a suitably hyperbolic Nicholas Cage as Joseph, the unwilling adoptive father who has spent the last decade and a half living with a mystery. Something happened in that stable in Bethlehem but exactly what it was remains a mystery to him. Now he’s subjected to the teen angst of the Boy (Noah Jupe, Honey Boy), who grows tired of perpetually fleeing the forces of Rome and is becoming less adept at hiding his seemingly supernatural origin.

Nathan has leapt on the inherently horrifying aspects of the Bible, the blood and fear. His vision of first century Egypt is a brutal, arid place, filled with suspicion and superstition, and Cage’s Joseph (referred to simply as the Carpenter) is struggling with both. Through a muttered inner monologue, he narrates his torments of trying to hide this thing that looks like a boy and that he fears may be much more. Adolescence has made the role of fatherhood even harder, as the Boy begins to lust over the neighbor girl (Souheila Yacoub, Climax), and there is true tension between father and someone else’s son.

Neither Cage nor Jupe is assisted much by FKA Twigs as the most wooden Madonna since the Röttgen Pietà was carved, a boring bundle of beatific nothings. However, fuel is added to their combustible relationship by the Stranger (Isla Johnston, The Queen’s Gambit), a feral wild child who becomes the ultimate bad influence on the future Messiah, playing games with lepers and snakes. Hers is a curling, snarling performance that amplifies and curdles the growing bitterness in Jupe’s Jesus, as all the while Cage’s Joseph falls into domineering fury and fear. The tension between rebelliousness and acceptance pulls the film towards an inevitably bleak end that is in some ways predictable but at least interesting in its fetid diversions.

Nathan seems to have taken his visual and narrative inspiration from the more supernatural elements of Mel Gibson’s infamous religious torture porn, The Passion of the Christ, but then Gibson copied those wholesale from the Iraq sequences of The Exorcist, so Nathan is undoubtedly stealing from the best. Everything is grimy and sweaty, festering and oppressive, a mood only reinforced through Lorenz Dangel’s caustic, yowling score. 

But the tone and the performances, as well as the striking cinematography of Simon Beaufils (Anatomy of a Fall), never quite cohere enough to overcome the story’s episodic nature. As much as The Carpenter’s Son threatens to swallow you whole, and as much as it probes the oft-ignored darkness inherent in the Bible even outside of the Apocrypha, its thesis remains a little too academic to move the soul.

This article appears in November 14 • 2025.