‘The Prodigy’ is a bad seed film done right
Director Nicholas McCarthy recognises that the buildup is more fun than the payoff
Creepy children are a mainstay of the horror genre. Going back to The Bad Seed and beyond, children have proved capable of unnerving audiences with a combination of precocious dialogue and psychopathic behaviour.
The chilling new horror film The Prodigy continues that fine tradition, with one intriguing complication: in the hands of director Nicholas McCarthy and screenwriter Jeff Buhler, the young villain is a metaphor for parental failure.
When Sarah and John (Taylor Schilling and Peter Mooney) bring home their newborn, Miles, it is with a sense of relief. They have been trying to conceive for so long. Years pass, and Sarah realises that Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) has extraordinary cognitive ability. By age eight, his parents have enrolled him in a school where he can receive special attention.
That doesn’t last long. In a burst of sudden violence, Miles grabs a mon- key wrench and beats a classmate. Alarmed, Sarah takes him to a behaviour specialist (Colm Feore), who suspects that another, more disturbed consciousness may inhabit Miles’s body, alongside his own.
Trusting the audience’s intelligence, the filmmakers waste no time with ambiguity over whether Miles is evil or simply misunderstood. Buhler’s script is clean and economical. What’s more refreshing is how the scariest moments upend the cliches of the genre.
When Sarah goes into labour, for example, a cute puppy watches her and John gather their hospital bag. We suspect that the poor dog will fall victim to Mile’s hands, and that it’s just a question of when. And that subplot does resolve itself in an exacting, tragic way. But by making the dog’s fate more about character development than chills, McCarthy creates an involving scenario that leads to a shattering payoff.
Horror fans will recognise Scott from the recent adaptation of Stephen King’s It. In that 2017 film, the actor played an achingly sincere little boy whose body is later possessed by a demonic spirit. As Miles, he hits those same notes — with an added dose of dark comedy. Scott transitions between these two modes seamlessly; his ability to contort his face and alter his tone make his portrayal utterly convincing. It’s rare to hear a child actor using four-letter words, especially in the way that they are spoken here.
The final stretch of The Prodigy involves Sarah’s desperate, and bizarre, plan to save her son. McCarthy adds just enough plausibility that we can accept the strategy, which clearly makes sense to her. Several nightmare sequences fuel her desperation, including a flourish so strange and bluntly effective that audiences will remember it long after the film is over. Schilling’s performance is crucial to the success of the film’s climax: Sarah makes many quick decisions, reversing some of them, but her turmoil never strikes a false note.
McCarthy is not (yet) a celebrated director, but The Prodigy may change that. As with his debut film The Pact, his greatest asset here is his patience, followed by his evocative use of light and shadow. He’s a filmmaker who recognises that the buildup is more fun than the payoff, and he manages to generate suspense with seemingly little happening on the screen.
If parents hire a sitter so they can see The Prodigy, they just may look at their kid differently when they get home. They may also be relieved that the caregiver is unharmed.