‘The Carpenter’s Son’ director defends Nicholas Cage Jesus film, spiritually impacted by it: ‘Not for everyone’

Writer-director Lotfy Nathan wants viewers to see “The Carpenter’s Son” as a bold artistic experiment; a “supernatural thriller” exploring the unrecorded years of Jesus’ youth.

But for most Christian audiences, the film is likely to register less as daring and more as deeply disturbing.

The film, starring Nicolas Cage as Joseph (“The Carpenter”), FKA Twigs as Mary (“Mother”) and Noah Jupe as a teenage Jesus (“The Boy”), reimagines Christ’s adolescence as a psychological and supernatural struggle between good and evil.

The film opens with Herod’s soldiers hurling infants into fires in Bethlehem in a frenzied attempt to eliminate the newborn Christ. The Holy Family subsequently flees into exile, ducking Roman patrols and sheltering The Boy from forces seen and unseen. Eventually, they settle in a remote Egyptian village, but the danger never subsides.

Drawing from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text rejected by the Church centuries ago, Nathan invents scenes in which Jesus kills a child, resurrects insects and leers at a naked woman showering before being tempted by “The Stranger” (Isla Johnston), a devil incarnated as a teenage girl.

Shot in Greece and styled as a gritty period piece during Jesus’ “lost years,” critics have praised its atmospheric cinematography and Cage’s tortured performance, but for Christians who hold Jesus’ sinlessness as central to the faith, the film’s premise will feel blasphemous.
In a recent interview with The Christian Post, Nathan, a British-American writer-director, acknowledged the controversy surrounding the project, noting that everyone has “seemed curious” about his motivation.

“They ask, ‘Is there some kind of agenda?’ But with those who have seen the film, there’s a more nuanced conversation,” he said.

Nathan said the idea came from discovering the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a noncanonical text that imagines the boy Jesus performing miracles and committing acts of violence.

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