An audacious, high-concept religious horror premise with striking imagery and a strong “biblical nightmare” hook, but the response suggests a film that is more intriguing than fully effective. It sounds best appreciated as an atmospheric, provocative genre experiment rather than a consistently gripping horror story.
Best for
Viewers drawn to blasphemous or apocryphal biblical horror
Fans of slow-burn, symbolic genre cinema
People curious about Nicolas Cage in offbeat, heightened roles
Audiences who like horror with art-house visuals and religious iconography
Skip if
You want tight pacing and constant scares
You prefer straightforward faith-based or mainstream horror
You’re put off by surreal, ambiguous, or deliberately weird storytelling
You want a polished, crowd-pleasing exorcism-style thriller
Overview
The Carpenter’s Son has one of those instantly legible horror premises that feels both ancient and modern: a sacred story reframed as a supernatural siege. Set in Roman-era Egypt, it leans on religious dread, apocryphal material, and a visually severe atmosphere to turn a familiar myth into something uncanny and unstable.
Worth noting
The film seems to have real ambition in its imagery and concept, but the overall reaction points to a work that can feel inert when it should be escalating. That tension between beautiful surfaces and dramatic drag is often what separates a memorable art-horror experiment from a fully satisfying one.
Bottom line
Still, there’s enough here for genre viewers who like their horror strange, symbolic, and a little sacrilegious. If you’re interested in biblical horror that plays more like a fever dream than a roller coaster, this is at least worth a look.
Top Letterboxd reviews
soph (3★) · 677 likes
Let’s all have an accent and not tell Nicolas Cage
evie (3.5★) · 587 likes
of course they made satan nonbinary as hell 🙄
davidehrlich (1.5★) · 469 likes
A hopelessly inert religious horror film based on the apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (as opposed to the four canonical gospels of The New Testament, which are obviously all composed of nothing but hard facts), Lotfy Nathan’s “The Carpenter’s Son” begins with a premise so crystalline that even a skeptical heathen like me can appreciate its truth: It would have been absolutely terrifying if the son of God suddenly rocked up on this mortal coil. Beautiful, too, at times, but… more A hopelessly inert religious horror film based on the apocryphal “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (as opposed to the four canonical gospels of The New Testament, which are obviously all composed of nothing but hard facts), Lotfy Nathan’s “The Carpenter’s Son” begins with a premise so crystalline that even a skeptical heathen like me can appreciate its truth: It would have been absolutely terrifying if the son of God suddenly rocked up on this mortal coil. Beautiful, too, at times, but… more
jacob · 278 likes
no one talking about nicolas cage’s range this man literally went from being a devil worshipping serial killer to jesus’ father
Horror Syndrome (3★) · 262 likes
Was waiting the whole movie for Jesus and Satan to kiss and fall in love.