Imagine being frightened of your own child. That is the terrible situation of young mom Sarah (Taylor Schilling) in “The Prodigy,” a new psychological horror from director Nicholas McCarthy.
Schilling is mother to Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) an extraordinarily gifted child who spoke at twenty weeks and could generally outthink everyone by the time he was old enough to walk. “Nothing wrong with this little guy,” says a doctor. “He’s very aware. Here’s what we call a smarty-pants.”
Soon though he displays antisocial behaviour. He can’t seem to connect with people at school, perhaps because he beat a classmate with a wrench in lab class. In his sleep he angrily mumbles some kind of foreign language. “You were having a bad dream,” mom says waking him. “It wasn’t a bad dream,” he says. “It was a good dream.”
Concerned that something is amiss Sarah takes Miles to a psychologist. Unable to find a medical reason for Miles’s condition the doctor refers him to another specialist, a professor (Colm Feore) who believes there is a battle being waged inside Miles. Most of the world believes in reincarnation he explains, wondering if could Miles be an old soul having another go at life. “These souls return for a reason to complete a task,” he says.
If Miles is sharing a body with an invading soul, what job must he complete? Which one will become dominant?
As far as creepy kid movies go “The Prodigy” is a six out of ten. The kid, with his blank stare and mismatched eyes gives Damien a run for his money—especially when he says stuff like, “Sometimes I leave my body when I sleep. I do it to make room.”—it’s the details that earn a demerit or two.
Director McCarthy does a good job at building tension and sets up some good set pieces but he’s undone somewhat not by the silly-but-fun premise but by ridiculous things that don’t make sense that distract from the main story. How is Miles still allowed to attend school after he wacked a kid with a wrench? Why does Sarah leave some material that clearly gives away what she’s about to do where Miles can see it? It goes on. I’m not looking for credibility in a movie about (MILD SPOILER!!) a reincarnated serial killer but virtually everything that doesn’t make sense also could have been avoided without changing the DNA of the story one iota.
“The Prodigy” is a little heavy-handed—Miles washes off his Halloween skull make up, but only from one side of his face, leaving behind an image that represents the duality of his personality—but it embraces the wild nature of its story, providing just enough uncomfortable moments to earn a recommendation.
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk about the pure pop art blast of “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part,” the creepy kid movie “The Prodigy” and the Liam Neeson controversy.
“The Overnight” is a smart, insightful but most of all, very uncomfortable film.
The story begins when Emily (Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Adam Scott), a married coupled transplanted from Seattle to Los Angeles for work, meet Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), an outgoing man who chats them up in a local park. Their kids hit it off so Kurt invites the couple over for pizzas and wine with his wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche). Eager to make friends, Emilia and Alex accept and enter a world ripe with sexual tension, voyeurism, skinny-dipping and self confession. What begins as a dinner party quickly erupts into part drug and drink binge, part therapy session. “This is California,” says the slightly naïve Adam, “maybe this is what dinner parties are like here.”
On the surface “The Overnight” is simply about that moment when, as they say in the film, the party turns from freewheeling California vibe to swinger vibe but that doesn’t do the story justice. That’s the Cole’s Notes version of the story but the actual tale is much more interesting.
This is a parlour show where most of the action takes place in one place. Think “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” In this case the bulk the story happens in Kurt and Charlotte’s upscale home as the older, more jaded couple wile away the hours, breaking down Emily and Adam’s inhibitions while revealing their own martial issues and weaknesses. It’s a power struggle with a constantly shifting dynamic that turns into a guessing game as to what, exactly, is going on. It is that ambiguity that propels the action forward.
Good casting keeps things interesting—Schwartzman is smarmy perfection—and at just 80 minutes “The Overnight” is the right length for a cat and mouse story. Any longer and this story of sexual frustration might have become frustrating, but director Patrick Brice brings the story to an end before the anxiety of the situation becomes too uncomfortable for the audience.
Nicolas Sparks is to romance writing what Buckley’s cough syrup is to a tickly throat. They both get the job done, but leave a sickly sweet aftertaste.
“The Lucky One” sees Zac Efron play Logan, a Marine with three tours of duty in Iraq under his belt. After one deadly night raid in which several Marines are killed, he finds a photo of a beautiful woman with the words “Stay safe” written on the back. The mystery woman becomes his guardian angel when a bomb explodes seconds after he picked up the picture. If he hadn’t left his post to retrieve the photo he would have been killed. He tries in vain to find the owner of the photo and when he is transferred stateside his search takes him to North Carolina and Beth (Taylor Schilling), the girl in the photo.
Sparks-isms abound in “The Lucky One.” The pen behind stories like “Dear John” and “Nights in Rodanthe” gives us characters with soap opera names like Drake and Logan, people who say things like, “You should be kissed every day, every hour, every minute,” and lovers making out in a shower. Unfortunately there isn’t anything here nearly as memorable as “The Notebook’s” lake full of swans scene. Instead we’re given a collection of starry-eyed Sparksian banalities strung together in place of a story.
The story, such that it is, is so slight, so predictable that it has to be fleshed out with musical montages and scenes that don’t forward the story, but simply reinforce what we already know about the characters. We get it, Logan is troubled, but he likes dogs, reads philosophy and plays piano, so he can’t be a bad guy.
That’s as deep as the character study gets in this romance. The characters are black and white—there are no shades of grey. The good people are pure and virtuous; the bad people are corrupt and mean.
If watching good looking people fall in love is enough for you—and that’s OK—then spend your money on “The Lucky One.” But I couldn’t help but think that Efron, when he says to Beth, “I know you deserve better than this,” was actually speaking to the audience.
Imagine being frightened of your own child. That is the terrible situation of young mom Sarah (Taylor Schilling) in “The Prodigy,” a new psychological horror from director Nicholas McCarthy.
