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The Prodigy on DVD May 7, 2019 starring Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Peter Mooney, Colm Feore. Taylor Schilling stars in The Prodigy as Sarah, a mother whose young son Miles' disturbing behavior signals that an evil, possibly supernat.
Thanks for all of your research and persistence in helping us navigate through stormy waters.' Plugged In helps college student stand-up for his belief'Thanks for the great job you do in posting movie and television reviews online. I’m a college freshman and I recently had a confrontational disagreement with my English professor regarding an R-rated film. It is her favorite movie and she wanted to show it in class. I went to your Web site to research the film’s content. Although I had not seen the movie myself, I was able to make an educated argument against it based on the concerns you outlined.
The prof said that she was impressed by my stand and decided to poll the whole class and give us a choice. We overwhelmingly voted to watch a G-rated movie instead! I’ve learned that I can trust your site and I will be using it a lot in the future.”. Talulah always knew there was something wrong with that kid.
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Dogs just have a nose for this sort of thing. But the boy's parents are a little slower on the uptake.It's not their fault, really. Sarah and John love 8-year-old Miles, after all—as tenderly and as sacrificially as any parent would. And not many parenting books unpack the risks of a child's body being shared by a dead serial killer. So they weren't too alarmed when Miles began to speak Hungarian in his sleep (which they assumed was gibberish at first). Or when he started asking for paprika on all his dinners.True, when Miles pounded a fellow student nearly to death with a wrench well, that was more concerning.
Still, nothing a good psychologist and some tender loving care couldn't deal with, right?But Talulah knows better. She can sense the presence in the boy's body. She growls when that 'other thing' is near. She stares at the lad suspiciously when the kid's eating his paprika-loaded dinners.Too bad that Talulah can't tell her owners all about Miles. Too bad she can't help Sarah and John see or hear or even smell what's going on with their son.Too bad that Miles found that pair of garden sheers, too.
It's certainly not John and Sarah's fault that Miles is a little different. They love their little lad, and even when they see that something's seriously wrong with the kid, they do everything in their power to help him.At one point, Miles asks to sleep in his mother's bed. He curls up next to Sarah and puts his hand on her shoulder—a strangely threatening gesture, given that Sarah's beginning to see the depths of Miles' 'sickness.'
'Will you always love me, no matter what I do?' Miles says.Sarah—filled with fear and revulsion, but maternal love and compassion as well—says, 'Yes, Miles. I will always love you.'
That's a seriously nice sentiment, and true as well. Too bad that Miles isn't always Miles. Demon possession is soooo 2015, apparently.
Though evil, possessed children have been a staple of horror flicks for decades, this film takes the more Eastern, vaguely New Agey tack of reincarnation. We get a quick mini-lecture on its popularity throughout much of the world, and we hear that it's 'only foreign to Western minds.' Arthur Jacobson is the first to truly recognize Miles' condition for what it is. He's described as an 'aging hippie' living off his inheritance. But he's also an expert in reincarnation and tells stories that, he hopes, prove its veracity.He first meets Sarah, incidentally, in an office where we can see an old Gothic church outside. Eventually, Arthur convinces Sarah to bring Miles in for a hypnosis session, where Arthur hopes to peel back time and discover the other guy living in Miles' body. Alas for Arthur, Miles—or rather the guy inside Miles—is a step ahead.
This so-called regression therapy seems to work, but Edward (the serial killer inhabiting Miles) tells Arthur that he took some drugs out of Arthur's medicine cabinet and took them—and picked some pubic hairs off Arthur's toilet and stuck them in his teeth, too. If Arthur doesn't back off, Edward will say that Miles fell asleep in the office (because of the drugs in his system) and woke up as Arthur was sexually abusing him. If Arthur dares deny it, a blood test will prove that Miles was suspiciously drugged.In flashback, we see Edward—apparently completely naked, gunned down by police.
(Critical parts are strategically covered.). Edward is a brutal killer.
We see evidence of that in a flashback to when he had his own body. His last would-be victim escapes and is found along the side of the road, missing a hand. When Edward is shot and killed (bullets bloodily perforating his torso), he's holding that missing hand, now gray and beginning to rot. We're told the missing hands were Edward's killing calling card. We're also told, repeatedly, that he removed the hands before he killed his victims.
We see several pictures of bloodied, disfigured corpses and their disembodied hands.Once he takes up residence inside Miles (when the boy is just a newborn), Edward starts relatively slowly. We Miles as a toddler crush a spider in his bare hands. He takes the wrench and pounds his classmate with it.
(Most of the actual blows, at least in this case, are just suggested.) He also tricks his babysitter to walk down the basement stairs and step on a broken glass bottle: A massive shard of glass (along with several smaller ones) bloodily embeds itself in her food, and she has to pull it out.And when his 'gibberish' is translated from its native Hungarian, we learn the little boy was apparently speaking to a past victim—threatening to cut her eyes out if she didn't stop crying.When the family's dog goes missing, John—Miles' father—takes Miles out to help him search. Miles creepily speculates that maybe the dog was hit by a car. He says that when dogs die, they like to die alone. 'We all have to go sometime,' Miles says, turning to his dad. We don't see Miles kill the dog. But when Sarah follows a fly infestation down to the basement, where she finds the animal's bloody corpse (minus its paws) hidden underneath a work table. (She keeps the corpse around to show her husband, and so we also see it again.)A woman is stabbed several times, a knife ripping across her midsection and stabbing the palm of her hand.
She does not survive. Someone else is stabbed in the side while driving: The car hurtles into a tree, and we later see the victim lying in a hospital bed. (Doctors say they'll keep the victim in a coma for several months, then determine if the victim has any brain damage.) Two people are shot and killed.Miles tells a social worker that someone is 'hurting' him. Sarah initially seems to suspect John, who was himself physically abused by his own father. John's not abusing Miles, but when Miles enrages John at one point, John looks like he's close to physical violence. He spends some nights away from home to 'cool down.' Miles plays a violent, shoot-em-up video game (and seems to relish it).
Right after he's born, Miles' infant body is dotted with blood matching where Edward's own bullet wounds were. Horror movies are built on subverting our highest ideals and playing on our deepest fears.
So in a way, The Prodigy knows just where to aim: After all, perhaps no ideal is more celebrated than a mother's love for her child. Perhaps no fear is deeper than the thought that something's seriously broken in our child—something that we have no idea how to fix.If the great theologian Augustine was around today, plunking down money for seedy horror films, he might draw an interesting parallel between movies like The Prodigy and how he believed the devil himself works: Unable to create, Satan can only twist and pervert. God's gifts are turned into the world's temptations and troubles and sins.Perhaps that's why movies like The Prodigy get under our skin. It's by design: The plot twists something so good and turns it into something so horrible. The fact that Sarah and John love Miles so much compounds evil and horror they must deal with as the story wears on.But The Prodigy, for all its unabashed cruelty and grotesquery, is less effective as a horror movie than it could've been. Perhaps that's because it tries to craft a coherent supernatural rationale for Edward's reincarnation while wholly misunderstanding the spiritual tradition of its own trope.You see, Edward is no demon, no hellish creature: He's merely a killer whose life force has mystically, mysteriously invaded an innocent child. But that spiritually incoherent plot device doesn't jibe with any religion that I'm aware of that teaches reincarnation.
And that inconsistency makes The Prodigy an even more muddled mess—albeit a scary mess peppered with jump scenes and ominous foreboding, but lacking any sort of point.The Prodigy is indeed horrific, and in the worst sorts of ways. This horror film kills with abandon, mutilates with gusto and has absolutely nothing at all to say.
There’s no shortage of films about evil children, so at the risk of indulging in hyperbole, let’s just say Nicholas McCarthy’s “The Prodigy” is the latest. If the idea of a serial-killing pre-teen terrifies you, this film might give off some shivers, but “The Prodigy” doesn’t add anything terribly new to the recipe. Except a little paprika.
(Literally.)Taylor Schilling stars as Sarah, a woman whose eight-year-old child Miles (Jackson Robert Scott, “It: Chapter One”) has heterochromia (one eye is a different color than the other), and a genius-level intelligence. He also has a nasty tendency to beat his fellow students with a wrench.
There’s something terribly wrong with Miles, but Sarah just can’t figure out what it is.The audience, however, knows exactly what’s wrong from the film’s opening minutes. Miles was born at the exact same time as a despicable serial killer, Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux, “Frontier”), was shot dead by the police. And just in case the juxtaposition of an evil man’s death and the birth of a new baby wasn’t clear enough, Edward Scarka also had heterochromia. Because whatever deity is in charge of reincarnation in the “Prodigy” universe has a penchant for signing their work.Watch Video:“The Prodigy” is the latest installment in the “creepy kid” genre, in the tradition of classics like “The Bad Seed,” “The Omen” and “The Good Son” (OK, OK, they’re not all classics).
The idea is that a child is, to the audience, obviously evil, but the adult protagonists cannot imagine that their little darling is a monster. In the best of these movies, we wait in rapt suspense for the hero to catch up to us, as the child does one evil deed after another, free from suspicion because “Awwwwww, isn’t he adorable? He could never”. The genre works because we know that it’s possible, because every serial killer started somewhere, and the telltale warning signs — like hurting animals — often manifest in childhood. It’s easy to be blinded by love and to ignore red flags. But “The Prodigy” tips its hand so early, and provides so very few twists, that the film quickly runs out of material. It’s a feature-length version of the cast of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” yelling, “Get on with it!”Watch Video:We know right away that Miles is a reincarnated serial killer, but it takes Sarah about an hour to figure it out.
Which is pretty remarkable since the movie tells her the truth in the first act, flat out, and in no uncertain terms. Miles’ therapist, after only one session, decides that this troubled kid is obviously possessed and outsources her job to an expert in reincarnation played by Colm Feore (“House of Cards”). He tells Sarah flat out that Miles is an evil man trapped in a child’s body, and for a second, it looks like the movie might be getting somewhere, and quicker than you might expect. But no, we still have to wait for Sarah to catch up, and the film isn’t nearly exciting enough (read: the body count isn’t nearly high enough) to keep us invested that whole time.
“The Prodigy” takes place in a sterile, icily photographed world with very few people in it. Sarah and her husband John (Peter Mooney, “Burden of Truth”) have no friends, no family, and god only knows where they work. They seem to spend most of their time looking solemn and worrying about Miles, so it’s not like they have much of an excuse for overlooking his suspicious behavior.Also Read:Then again, what passes for “suspicious behavior” in “The Prodigy” is often absurd. We learn quickly that the late Edward Scarka was Hungarian, for example, so we’re supposed to tremble with terror when Miles inexplicably asks his father to pass the paprika. He likes paprika! He must be Hungarian! You should run!
Run for your lives!“The Prodigy” also suffers from “selective evil genius syndrome,” where the villain is only smart when the plot calls for it. In Miles’s body, Scarka is a cunning master manipulator who electronically bugs his own parents’ bedroom just to get the dirt on them. But when we meet Scarka in the prologue, he’s the kind of criminal who keeps his kidnapping victims locked up two feet from a convenient escape route and confronts the police naked while wielding a severed hand, as though he thinks it’s a gun.With scenes like that, it’s hard to take “The Prodigy” seriously, but the movie wants us to. It’s filmed like a tragedy, but the story is basically “Child’s Play” without the doll. It’s so broadly constructed, and so inherently ridiculous, that the film’s tensest moments often elicit giggles instead of shrieks, like when Miles goes Hannibal Lecter on his would-be hypnotist.
It’s such a massive shift in tone that laughter is a perfectly reasonable, although almost certainly unintentional response.There’s no sense of irony here, no twisted pleasure to be had. Even the film’s thin attempts at subtext fall apart, because there’s no room for doubt.
Miles isn’t a case of nature vs. Nurture, and he doesn’t represent the real-life fear of raising a psychopath. The parents are innocent, and so is Miles. The fantasy is just too literal, from the first scenes onward, for “The Prodigy” carry any deeper meaning.So we’re left with a film that’s too broad to be scary, and too morose to be campy.
A few good jump scares can’t save it, nor can the thoroughly capable performances by Schilling and Scott, who try their best to be believable and usually succeed. “The Prodigy” may offer some shocks to those susceptible to this genre, or who have never seen it before, but to horror fans it will probably seem unremarkable and even bland.Maybe they should have added more paprika.. 'Quiet town, peaceful, low maintenance. It can stay that way,' says a federal agent to the sheriff of the small town at the center of the new ABC drama 'The Crossing.' Yeah, good luck with that. In TV and movies, crazy, creepy, sci-fi, monster movie junk always goes down in quaint, tiny, Middle American suburbs far more often than it does in a big city.
Who has time for aliens in New York? Give me a full on invasion or nothing.
Leave the odd-goings on and the mysterious, unsolved disappearances to the town folk. This list charts the history of America's fictional small towns from kind of creepy to David Lynchian-grade bananas.
'Quiet town, peaceful, low maintenance. It can stay that way,' says a federal agent to the sheriff of the small town at the center of the new ABC drama 'The Crossing.' Yeah, good luck with that.
In TV and movies, crazy, creepy, sci-fi, monster movie junk always goes down in quaint, tiny, Middle American suburbs far more often than it does in a big city. Who has time for aliens in New York? Give me a full on invasion or nothing. Leave the odd-goings on and the mysterious, unsolved disappearances to the town folk.
This list charts the history of America's fictional small towns from kind of creepy to David Lynchian-grade bananas.