"Miles Isn’t Like Other Kids. His Intelligence Is Off The Charts. I Don’t Have An Exact Score, But It’ll Be Very High..."
Following on from The Hole in the Ground this month by being yet another horror movie fascinated with the eeriness of creepy children, The Prodigy, is the third big screen release from American filmmaker, Nicholas McCarthy, who returns to cinemas after the horror one-two of The Pact and At the Devil's Door. Featuring a screenplay from Jeff Buhler, a writer behind both the upcoming Pet Sematary and Nicolas Pesce's remake of The Grudge due to be released in 2020, The Prodigy sees Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black) as Sarah Blume, a middle class wife and mother to Jackson Robert Scott's (It - Chapter One) Miles, a talented and extraordinarily smart eight year old boy who soon begins to show violent tendencies and strange desires, resulting in Sarah attempting to find a cure or a reason for her son's sudden change in temperament and spirit which may or may not have anything to do with the death of a local deranged serial killer. Blending a narrative mix of The Omen and Lynne Ramsay's excellent, We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Prodigy is a film which has an awful amount of interesting ideas but slightly fails as a whole due to cliche after cliche and an overarching sense that we've definitely seen this all before.
Beginning in a very interesting fashion as we open up with a The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque prisoner escape as we cut back and forth between the discovery and subsequent death of Paul Fauteux's Ted Bundy inspired mass murderer and the birth of Miles, the opening act shifts through eight years of early life development as we see the heterochromia laden offspring of Schilling's Sarah progress from eerily silent baby to first school genius. With Scott making waves as the softly spoken Georgie in Andy Muschietti's outstanding It from 2017, McCarthy clearly sees The Prodigy as his own re-imagining of The Omen, with Scott's bowl shaped haircut and sudden behavioural changes making me sort of hoping someone would have checked the back of his neck to see if both the numbers 666 and a copyright symbol were burned into it. Whilst the film lacks in abundance any sort of originality, the tonal shifts between knowing horror and cattle-prod jump scares are actually rather well done, with one dream sequence in particular managing to make me shout a rather expletive heavy sentence loud enough for the entire cinema to hear, and whilst McCarthy's latest is neither terrifying or memorable, for the time it was on, it did the job and left without harming anyone whatsoever.
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