I’m not sure whether Joshua’s campiness outweighs its offensiveness – it’s got both in spades – but there’s no getting around the fact that George Ratliff’s creepy-kid thriller is seriously awful. With his story of the destruction of a hoity-toity Manhattan clan by their 9-year-old weirdo son Joshua (Jacob Kogan), Ratliff seeks to prey upon the anxieties of young parents while also condemning upper-class white folk and anyone who goes to church. Yet the overriding lesson conveyed by this derivative piece-o’-junk – which pays homage narratively to The Bad Seed, and atmospherically to Rosemary’s Baby – is that differences are both bad and dangerous. Joshua prefers museums to sports, his yuppie school uniform to typical adolescent garb, and his gay uncle Ned (Dallas Roberts) to dad Brad (Sam Rockwell) and mom Abby (crazy-haired Vera Farmiga), all signs that – along with his robotic demeanor – point towards him being a freak not to be trusted around the family dog or his infant sister. Ratliff’s suspenseful tone, discordant string score, and visual framing (in which Joshua is spatially separated from all other humans) are as clumsily overwrought as his cast’s performances are hysterical, in particular Farmiga as the titular boy’s full-on bonkers, post-partum depression-wracked mom. It’s ultimately unclear if Joshua’s evil behavior is the byproduct of his father and mother’s neglect and lack of compassion, part of a devious plot to live with Uncle Ned, or merely the inevitable consequence of his atypicality. Regardless of cause, however, what’s abundantly clear is the unintentional humor of every clunky shock-tactic and ominous aesthetic choice perpetrated by this monumentally crude and ineffective attempt at parental fear exploitation.
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