A Quietly Effective Thriller

Kaleidoscope’s latest is on Orion Pictures & MGM’s production of “The Prodigy”.  Directed by Nicholas McCarthy, the movie stars Taylor Schilling, Peter Mooney, Jackson Robert Scott, Colm Feore, Paula Boudreau, & Paul Fauteux.  Rated ‘R’, it has a running time of 1 hr., 32 min. 

The film opens on Oct. 22, 2010, as a screaming woman escapes from a remote farmhouse in Ohio.  As she is rescued, she screams that ‘he took my hand’!  The rescuer calls the police, & a SWAT team comes to the farmhouse & shoots & kills the serial killer Edward Scarka (Fauteux).  Concurrently with the death, a young couple Sarah (Schilling) & John Blume (Mooney) give birth to their son Miles (Scott) in Pennsylvania.  They soon realize that he is gifted as he shows way above-average intelligence & can speak fluently before becoming a toddler.  Upon turning 8, the parents notice that he is exhibiting some extreme negative behavioral changes.  Sarah brings him to a psychologist, Dr. Strasser (Boudreau); Sarah also brings a tape that she made of Miles talking nonsense in his sleep the previous night.  Upon hearing it & noticing a linguistic pattern, Strasser gives the tape to a colleague, Arthur Jacobsen (Feore), an expert on reincarnation, to see if it is, indeed, nonsense.  Jacobsen informs that Miles was indeed talking a foreign language-namely, a rare dialect spoken along the Hungarian-Romanian border, which roughly translates to “I’ll cut your eyes out and watch you die, whore’.  As Jacobsen explains that he believes that a spirit exists within Miles that believes that it has unfinished business on Earth, Act I concludes. 

McCarthy has created a film that is a hybrid of several others.  Part ‘The Omen’, part ‘The Exorcist’, part ‘The Bad Seed’, part ‘Village of the Damned’, this is a quietly unsettling little film.  While there are portions of extreme violence, most of what is creepy is produced thru the child’s eyes & the adults’ reactions to what he is doing.  Although the film is filled with familiar tropes of the horror/thriller genre—thanks to the direction & Jeff Buhler’s screenplay—they are, for the most part, effectively used.  The script uses disquieting uneasiness to provide much needed goosebumps at appropriate times, some of which can be anticipated, unfortunately, well before they occur.  The transitions between Miles & the entity are particularly well done.  Schilling is very good in her Chris MacNeil-inspired role.  She effectively handles the various emotions of a mom who loves her son dearly but must make decisions that, on the surface, may violate that love.  This is a far cry from her Piper Chapman character in ‘Orange’.  Although not required to do much, Mooney is a dad who is fighting his own demons that may or may not get in the way of his love for his son while determining what is best for Miles.  Scott is superb as Miles, a child who is trying to fight off the demon within.  Scott made his notable film debut as little Georgie Denborough in 2017’s ‘It’; he fulfills the promise that he demonstrated in that movie.  His performance here is chilling & truly frightening.  Joseph Bishara’s score is moody, anticipatory, & macabre at relevant times.  Bridger Nielson’s cinematography is appropriately dark & foreboding although there is nothing here that has not been seen before. 

I give “The Prodigy” 2½ out of 5 nuggets.  This is a satisfying horror/thriller that, while derivative, accomplishes most of its trope-laden scenes with effectiveness.  If you are tired of the type of dreck that is laced throughout Netflix’s & Prime’s choices in this genre, head to your local cineplex for this movie’s unsettling 1½ hour run time.